ProSight Ransomware Preparedness ReportRansomware has become the weapon of choice for the major cyber-crime organizations, posing an existential threat to businesses that fall victim. The latest strains of ransomware target everything, including backup, making even partial recovery a long and expensive process. New variations of ransomware like Ryuk, Hermes, and MongoLock have made the headlines, displacing WannaCry, Locky, and NotPetya in notoriety, elaborateness, and destructive impact.

90% of ransomware infections come from innocent-seeming emails with malicious links or attachments, and many are so-called "zero-day" attacks that can escape detection by traditional signature-based antivirus (AV) tools. While user education and frontline detection are critical to defend against ransomware, best practices dictate that you assume some attacks will succeed and that you put in place a strong backup solution that allows you to recover quickly with minimal damage.

Progent's ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report is an ultra-affordable service centered around an interview with a Progent security consultant experienced in ransomware defense and recovery. Progent will help determine your company's readiness to block or recover from a ransomware attack. During this interview Progent will work directly with you to gather pertinent information about your security and backup environment. Progent will use this information to produce a written Basic Security and Best Practices Report detailing how to apply best practices for configuring and managing your security and backup systems.

Progent’s Basic Security and Best Practices Report focuses on key issues associated with prevention (Security) and recovery (Backups). The review addresses:

Security

  • Correct use of administration accounts
  • Correct NTFS and SMB permissions
  • Optimal firewall settings
  • AntiVirus and configuration
Backups
  • Split permission model for backup protection
  • Backing up required servers (AD)
  • Offsite backups including cloud backup to Azure
The interview process included with the ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report service takes about one hour for a typical small business network and longer for larger or more complex environments. The written report includes recommendations for improving your ability to ward off or recover from a ransomware attack, and Progent can provide as-needed expertise to help you and your IT staff create a cost-effective security/backup solution tailored to your business needs.

About Ransomware
Ransomware is a form of malware that either encrypts files so they are unreadable or deletes them altogether. Ransomware often locks the victim's computer so it is unusable. To reverse the damage, the victim is required to pay a specified amount of money (the ransom), typically via a crypto currency like Bitcoin, within a short time window. There is no guarantee that paying the ransom will result in a recovery. Compromised or deleted files can extend throughout a network depending on the victim's write permissions, and the military-grade encryption algorithm used on the hostage files cannot be broken. The most common ransomware attack vector is spoofed email, which the user is lured into opening by a social engineering technique known as spear phishing. This makes the email look as though it came from a trusted sender.

CryptoLocker opened the modern era of ransomware in 2013, and the damage caused by ransomware variants is estimated at billions of dollars annually, more than doubling every two years. Notorious recent threats include WannaCry/WannaCrypt, Locky, Cerber, NotPetya and Spora. Current high-profile threats like Ryuk, Hermes, and MongoLock are more elaborate and have caused more havoc. Because new variants of ransomware crop up daily, there is no guarantee that conventional signature-matching anit-virus tools will block the latest attack. If an attack does show up in an email, it is critical that your users have been educated to be wary of social engineering tricks. Your last line of defense is a solid scheme for scheduling and retaining offsite backups plus the deployment of reliable recovery tools.

ProSight Managed Services Offered by Progent
Progent's ProSight network management suite is a family of affordable, subscription-based service packages that allow small and mid-size businesses to outsource crucial IT management functions. ProSight services that can help defend against or recover from ransomware attacks include email filtering, next-generation AV based on behavior analysis, automatic isolation of infected computers and immediate inoculation of safe devices, plus cloud-based backup with both granular and whole-site recovery.

  • ProSight Active Security Monitoring: Endpoint Protection and Ransomware Defense
    Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) is an endpoint protection (EPP) solution that utilizes cutting edge behavior-based machine learning technology to guard physical and virtual endpoint devices against modern malware assaults like ransomware and file-less exploits, which routinely get by legacy signature-based anti-virus tools. ProSight ASM safeguards local and cloud resources and provides a single platform to manage the complete threat lifecycle including protection, detection, mitigation, remediation, and forensics. Key capabilities include single-click rollback using Windows VSS and automatic system-wide immunization against newly discovered threats. Learn more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) endpoint protection and ransomware defense.

  • ProSight Enhanced Security Protection: Physical and Virtual Endpoint Security and Exchange Email Filtering
    ProSight Enhanced Security Protection services deliver economical in-depth protection for physical and virtual servers, workstations, smartphones, and Exchange email. ProSight ESP utilizes adaptive security and advanced heuristics for continuously monitoring and responding to cyber threats from all vectors. ProSight ESP provides firewall protection, intrusion alerts, device management, and web filtering through leading-edge technologies packaged within one agent accessible from a unified console. Progent's data protection and virtualization consultants can help you to plan and configure a ProSight ESP environment that addresses your organization's specific requirements and that allows you demonstrate compliance with government and industry data protection regulations. Progent will help you specify and configure policies that ProSight ESP will enforce, and Progent will monitor your network and react to alerts that call for immediate action. Progent's consultants can also assist you to install and test a backup and restore solution like ProSight Data Protection Services so you can recover rapidly from a potentially disastrous security attack like ransomware. Find out more about Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection unified endpoint security and Microsoft Exchange filtering.

  • ProSight Data Protection Services: Managed Backup and Recovery
    ProSight Data Protection Services from Progent provide small and mid-sized organizations an affordable end-to-end service for reliable backup/disaster recovery. Available at a low monthly rate, ProSight DPS automates and monitors your backup processes and allows rapid recovery of critical data, apps and virtual machines that have become lost or corrupted as a result of hardware breakdowns, software bugs, disasters, human mistakes, or malicious attacks like ransomware. ProSight DPS can help you back up, retrieve and restore files, folders, apps, system images, plus Hyper-V and VMware images/. Critical data can be backed up on the cloud, to an on-promises device, or mirrored to both. Progent's BDR specialists can provide world-class support to configure ProSight DPS to be compliant with government and industry regulatory standards such as HIPPA, FINRA, and PCI and, when necessary, can help you to recover your business-critical information. Learn more about ProSight Data Protection Services Managed Cloud Backup and Recovery.

  • ProSight Email Guard: Inbound and Outbound Spam Filtering and Data Leakage Protection
    ProSight Email Guard is Progent's spam filtering service that uses the infrastructure of top information security companies to deliver web-based control and world-class protection for your email traffic. The powerful structure of Email Guard managed service integrates cloud-based filtering with an on-premises security gateway device to offer complete defense against spam, viruses, Denial of Service Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks (DHAs), and other email-borne malware. Email Guard's cloud filter serves as a first line of defense and keeps most unwanted email from making it to your security perimeter. This reduces your vulnerability to inbound threats and saves system bandwidth and storage space. Email Guard's onsite security gateway device adds a deeper layer of inspection for inbound email. For outbound email, the local security gateway provides AV and anti-spam protection, protection against data leaks, and email encryption. The onsite security gateway can also help Exchange Server to track and protect internal email traffic that originates and ends inside your security perimeter. For more details, visit Email Guard spam filtering and data leakage protection.

  • ProSight WAN Watch: Network Infrastructure Remote Monitoring and Management
    Progent’s ProSight WAN Watch is an infrastructure management service that makes it simple and inexpensive for smaller organizations to diagram, monitor, enhance and debug their connectivity appliances like routers and switches, firewalls, and wireless controllers plus servers, printers, client computers and other networked devices. Incorporating state-of-the-art Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) technology, ProSight WAN Watch ensures that infrastructure topology diagrams are always current, captures and manages the configuration of almost all devices connected to your network, tracks performance, and generates alerts when potential issues are discovered. By automating time-consuming management activities, WAN Watch can cut hours off common chores such as making network diagrams, expanding your network, finding devices that need critical software patches, or identifying the cause of performance issues. Find out more details about ProSight WAN Watch infrastructure monitoring and management services.

  • ProSight LAN Watch: Server and Desktop Remote Monitoring
    ProSight LAN Watch is Progent’s server and desktop monitoring managed service that incorporates state-of-the-art remote monitoring and management technology to help keep your IT system running at peak levels by tracking the state of critical computers that drive your information system. When ProSight LAN Watch detects an issue, an alert is transmitted immediately to your specified IT management staff and your assigned Progent engineering consultant so any potential problems can be addressed before they have a chance to disrupt your network. Learn more about ProSight LAN Watch server and desktop remote monitoring consulting.

  • ProSight Virtual Hosting: Hosted Virtual Machines at Progent's World-class Data Center
    With Progent's ProSight Virtual Hosting service, a small business can have its critical servers and applications hosted in a secure fault tolerant data center on a fast virtual machine host set up and managed by Progent's IT support experts. Under the ProSight Virtual Hosting service model, the client owns the data, the operating system platforms, and the applications. Since the environment is virtualized, it can be ported immediately to an alternate hosting environment without requiring a time-consuming and difficult configuration procedure. With ProSight Virtual Hosting, you are not tied a single hosting provider. Find out more about ProSight Virtual Hosting services.

  • ProSight IT Asset Management: Network Documentation Management
    ProSight IT Asset Management service is a cloud-based IT documentation management service that allows you to capture, maintain, find and protect information related to your network infrastructure, processes, business apps, and services. You can quickly locate passwords or IP addresses and be alerted about upcoming expirations of SSL certificates ,domains or warranties. By cleaning up and organizing your IT documentation, you can eliminate up to 50% of time thrown away searching for critical information about your IT network. ProSight IT Asset Management includes a centralized location for storing and sharing all documents required for managing your business network like recommended procedures and self-service instructions. ProSight IT Asset Management also supports advanced automation for gathering and relating IT data. Whether you’re making enhancements, performing regular maintenance, or reacting to a crisis, ProSight IT Asset Management gets you the information you need the instant you need it. Find out more about Progent's ProSight IT Asset Management service.
Read or Download Progent's White Paper: 10 Benefits of Managed IT Services
To download a white paper describing why managed services are rapidly takingthe place of the old break/fix model of IT support for small and mid-size businesses, click:
10 Benefits of Managed IT Services. (PDF - 710 KB)

ProSight Network Audits
Progent's ProSight Network Audits are a fast and affordable alternative for small and medium-size businesses to get an objective evaluation of the health of their IT system. Based on a selection of the leading remote monitoring and management tools available, and supervised by Progent's certified team of information technology experts, ProSight Network Audits help you see how closely the configuration of your core infrastructure assets conform to industry best practices. Both the Basic and Advanced versions of ProSight Network Audit services are offered at a budget-friendly, one-time cost and provide immediate ROI like a more manageable Active Directory system. Both also come with a year of cutting-edge remote network monitoring and management. Benefits can include lower-cost management, better compliance with data security standards, more efficient utilization of IT resources, quicker troubleshooting, more dependable backup and restore, and higher availability. Learn more information about Progent's ProSight Network Audits network infrastructure review.

Contact Progent to Find Out More about Progent's ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report Service
For pricing information and to learn more about how Progent's ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report can reduce your vulnerability to ransomware, call Progent at 800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.

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