Remote Network Management for Small and Midsize Businesses

Ransomware 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, Maze, Sodinokibi, Netwalker, and Egregor have made the headlines, displacing WannaCry, Cerber, CryptoWall, 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
• Secure RDP connections
• AntiVirus tools selection and configuration

• Split permission model for backup protection
• Backing up required servers (AD)
• Offsite backups including cloud backup to Azure

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. A 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. The most targeted attack vector is an improperly secured Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) port. These are becoming more of a problem as businesses support more at-home workers.

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, Maze, and Sodinokibi are more elaborate and have caused more havoc. Even if your backup processes allow you to recover your ransomed files, you can still be threatened by exfiltration, where stolen data is made publc (known as "doxxing"). 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 is an endpoint protection service that utilizes cutting edge behavior machine learning tools to guard physical and virtual endpoints against modern malware attacks such as ransomware and email phishing, which routinely evade traditional signature-matching anti-virus tools. ProSight Active Security Monitoring protects local and cloud resources and provides a single platform to address the complete threat lifecycle including blocking, infiltration detection, containment, remediation, and forensics. Key capabilities include single-click rollback using Windows VSS and automatic network-wide immunization against newly discovered threats. Find out more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring endpoint protection and ransomware defense.

• ProSight Enhanced Security Protection (ESP): Endpoint Security and Exchange Email Filtering
  Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection (ESP) services offer ultra-affordable in-depth security for physical servers and virtual machines, desktops, smartphones, and Exchange Server. ProSight ESP utilizes adaptive security and modern behavior analysis for continuously monitoring and responding to security assaults from all attack vectors. ProSight ESP delivers firewall protection, penetration alerts, endpoint management, and web filtering through leading-edge tools packaged within a single agent accessible from a single console. Progent's security and virtualization experts can help your business to plan and configure a ProSight ESP environment that meets your organization's specific requirements and that allows you prove compliance with government and industry data security standards. Progent will help you define and implement policies that ProSight ESP will manage, and Progent will monitor your network and react to alerts that require immediate action. Progent's consultants can also assist your company to set up and verify a backup and disaster recovery solution such as ProSight Data Protection Services so you can recover quickly from a destructive security attack such as ransomware. Learn more about Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection unified endpoint protection and Microsoft Exchange email filtering.

• ProSight Data Protection Services: Managed Backup and Disaster Recovery
  ProSight Data Protection Services offer small and medium-sized organizations a low cost end-to-end service for reliable backup/disaster recovery. Available at a fixed monthly price, ProSight DPS automates your backup processes and enables rapid recovery of critical files, applications and virtual machines that have become unavailable or corrupted due to hardware breakdowns, software bugs, disasters, human mistakes, or malicious attacks such as ransomware. ProSight DPS can help you back up, recover and restore files, folders, applications, system images, as well as Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware virtual machine images. Important data can be protected on the cloud, to a local storage device, or to both. Progent's cloud backup consultants can provide world-class expertise to set up ProSight Data Protection Services to be compliant with regulatory requirements like HIPAA, FIRPA, PCI and Safe Harbor and, whenever needed, can assist you to recover your business-critical information. Read more about ProSight Data Protection Services Managed Backup.

• ProSight Email Guard: Inbound and Outbound Spam Filtering and Data Leakage Protection
  ProSight Email Guard is Progent's spam and virus filtering and email encryption service that incorporates the infrastructure of leading information security vendors to deliver centralized control and world-class protection for all your email traffic. The hybrid architecture of Email Guard integrates cloud-based filtering with an on-premises gateway appliance to provide advanced defense against spam, viruses, Dos Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks, and other email-based threats. The Cloud Protection Layer serves as a preliminary barricade and keeps the vast majority of threats from making it to your network firewall. This decreases your exposure to inbound attacks and conserves system bandwidth and storage. Email Guard's on-premises gateway device provides a further level of analysis for incoming email. For outgoing email, the local security gateway provides AV and anti-spam protection, policy-based Data Loss Prevention, and email encryption. The on-premises gateway can also help Microsoft Exchange Server to monitor and safeguard internal email that originates and ends within your corporate firewall. For more details, visit ProSight Email Guard spam and content filtering.

• ProSight WAN Watch: Infrastructure Management
  ProSight WAN Watch is a network infrastructure monitoring and management service that makes it simple and inexpensive for small and mid-sized businesses to diagram, track, reconfigure and troubleshoot their networking hardware like routers, firewalls, and access points plus servers, endpoints and other networked devices. Using state-of-the-art RMM technology, WAN Watch ensures that network diagrams are always current, captures and displays the configuration information of virtually all devices connected to your network, tracks performance, and sends alerts when potential issues are discovered. By automating tedious network management processes, WAN Watch can cut hours off common tasks like network mapping, expanding your network, finding devices that need important updates, or isolating performance problems. Find out more details about ProSight WAN Watch infrastructure monitoring and management services.

• ProSight LAN Watch: Server and Desktop Monitoring
  ProSight LAN Watch is Progent’s server and desktop monitoring managed service that incorporates advanced remote monitoring and management (RMM) technology to help keep your network operating at peak levels by tracking the health of vital assets that power your information system. When ProSight LAN Watch detects a problem, an alert is sent immediately to your designated IT staff and your assigned Progent consultant so that any potential problems can be addressed before they can impact productivity. Find out more details about ProSight LAN Watch server and desktop monitoring services.

• ProSight Virtual Hosting: Hosted VMs at Progent's Tier III Data Center
  With Progent's ProSight Virtual Hosting service, a small organization can have its key servers and apps hosted in a protected fault tolerant data center on a fast virtual host configured and managed by Progent's network support professionals. Under Progent's ProSight Virtual Hosting service model, the client owns the data, the OS platforms, and the apps. Since the environment is virtualized, it can be moved immediately to an alternate hosting environment without a lengthy and technically risky configuration procedure. With ProSight Virtual Hosting, your business is not tied one hosting provider. Learn more about ProSight Virtual Hosting services.

• ProSight IT Asset Management: Network Documentation Management
  Progent's ProSight IT Asset Management service is an IT infrastructure documentation management service that allows you to create, update, retrieve and safeguard data related to your IT infrastructure, procedures, business apps, and services. You can instantly find passwords or serial numbers and be warned about impending expirations of SSL certificates or domains. By cleaning up and organizing your IT infrastructure documentation, you can eliminate as much as 50% of time spent trying to find critical information about your network. ProSight IT Asset Management includes a centralized location for storing and collaborating on all documents related to managing your business network like standard operating procedures and self-service instructions. ProSight IT Asset Management also offers advanced automation for collecting and associating IT information. Whether you’re making enhancements, performing regular maintenance, or responding to a crisis, ProSight IT Asset Management delivers the knowledge you need as soon as you need it. Read more about ProSight IT Asset Management service.

ProSight Network Audits
Progent's ProSight Network Audits offer a fast and affordable alternative for small and mid-size businesses to obtain an unbiased assessment of the overall health of their network. Based on some of the top remote monitoring and management (RMM) platforms available, and overseen by Progent's certified team of information technology professionals, ProSight Network Audits show you how closely the configuration of your essential network assets adhere to industry leading practices. Both the Basic and Advanced options for ProSight Network Audit services are available at a budget-friendly, one-time cost and deliver instant benefits such as a more manageable Active Directory (AD) environment. Both also include a year of advanced remote network monitoring and management. Benefits can include simpler network management, improved compliance with information security requirements, higher utilization of IT assets, quicker troubleshooting, more dependable backup and restore, and increased uptime. Learn more information about ProSight Network Audits IT 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.