Cyber Defense Journey: Ransomware Readiness

Learn how to defend against ransomware

Cyber Defense journey ransomware readiness

Is your organization ransomware ready? Dodge security snakes and test your defenses while gaining insight into the best ways to build better cybersecurity maturity and ransomware resistance. This is more than just a game of luck – it's all about strategy.

Put Your Preparedness to the Test

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Choosing the right IR partner reduces the risk of lasting damage to your enterprise and helps smooth the return to business as usual.

Place an incident response (IR) firm on retainer

Zero-days grab the headlines, but threat actors often scan for and exploit vulnerabilities where patches have been available for some time. Promptly and regularly patch and update systems and applications, especially those that are external-facing, according to your organization’s individual risk factors.

Implement a regular patching program, prioritized by risk

Use MFA for an extra layer of security on all accounts, even those belonging to admin roles and C-level executives. Phishing-resistant and zero trust MFA architectures add even more protection, preventing threat actors from leveraging stolen credentials.

Implement comprehensive multi-factor authentication

Outdated systems are no longer supported, leading to vulnerabilities that don’t get patched, and ways into your network for attackers.

Your system reached end of life

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Conduct regular vulnerability scans, using automation to speed vulnerability management maturity. Update systems that no longer receive patches or close them to the internet.

Identify and patch vulnerabilities

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When a ransomware attack happens, there’s no time to waste. A fully tested incident response plan, developed to meet your organization’s particular needs, helps you react swiftly, reducing the potential damage caused by the incident.

Develop, test, and understand an incident response plan

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Email scanning and filtering protects against phishing and malware distribution, which often lead to ransomware attacks.

SCAN EMAILS FOR MALICIOUS ATTACHMENTS AND EMBEDDED URLs

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When an incident happens, your entire organization may need to respond. Tabletop exercises give all your stakeholders the opportunity to understand what to do when a cyber emergency occurs and form a vital part of engaging the buy-in of senior executives.

Conduct regular tabletop exercises

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Flat networks make it easy for an adversary to move laterally once they gain access. Organizations can minimize the impact of an attack and reduce the spread of ransomware by applying logical segmentation in their environment.

Build in network segmentation

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Incident response plans must be easily accessible in order to be useful during catastrophic attacks.

Develop and test an incident response plan and back it up offsite

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Untested or hard to find incident response plans (or ones that have been encrypted) waste vital time in a crisis, making recovery more difficult.

Your IR plan is missing or encrypted

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Cybersecurity affects everyone, whether it’s everyday defense like using MFA, or knowing how to react during an incident. Always keep senior executives informed and involved.

Involve senior management in crisis planning

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When executives consider cybersecurity a cost center rather than a benefit and refuse to engage, it’s hard to improve your security posture.

The C-Suite has other priorities

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Prevent attackers from reusing compromised credentials to regain entry or from sharing them with other threat actors.

Reset potentially compromised or exposed passwords and credentials

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A modern password strategy improves security and reduces the user burden. Rotate passwords less frequently while requiring longer, stronger passwords incorporating phrases.

Require better passwords, get happier employees

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Cyber threats don’t disappear at the end of the working day. Holistic and continuous monitoring of your endpoint, network, cloud, and identity resources keeps you protected 24x7 from threat actors looking for security gaps.

Comprehensive XDR coverage, operating 24x7

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It’s always threat o’clock, somewhere. As attacker dwell times drop, XDR meets your need to monitor your entire attack surface for threats 24x7.

Implement 24x7 threat detection and response

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Initial access to ransomware deployment can take as little as four hours. What if it happens at the weekend when nobody is monitoring alerts?

Your SOC takes weekends off

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Ensure that local administrators have separate credentials for their standard and administrative activities to make it difficult for threat actors to elevate privileges.

Follow least privilege best practice

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Regulators, customers, and other stakeholders all need to be informed when a breach occurs. Planning your communications strategy in advance can prevent expensive missteps that make the long-term impact of incidents worse.

Put a crisis communication plan in place

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You can’t protect your assets if you don’t know what and where they are. Conducting regular IT asset audits provides both security and compliance benefits, helping you identify security gaps and keep your defenses up to date.

Understand the nature and location of your IT and other critical assets

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You can’t protect it if you don’t know what or where it is. Manage who has access to which assets, and revoke privileges as necessary. This serves to keep your organization secure and reduce risk.

Audit your IT assets and know their locations

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Not OK, when it comes to security. Between remote locations, automation tools that help you build your own apps, and employees downloading potentially infected freeware, you risk entirely losing track of what’s being run on your networks.

You rely on shadow IT

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Disabling unused ports and restricting direct access to internet-facing services to a defined admin IP range helps stop threat actors from gaining access to network devices.

Harden internet-facing services

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Phishing attacks are common, and some users can be susceptible to social engineering. Regular employee training helps to reduce risk and helps employees users understand the role they play in limiting the impact of cybersecurity breaches.

Develop and conduct regular employee security awareness training

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Adversary emulation, penetration, and other forms of offensive security testing are your best predictor of how your entire ransomware prevention ecosystem will perform in a real attack. Offensive security testing exists to help you pressure-test the defenses you’ve worked (and invested) to build and show you how you’ll fare in a real adversarial engagement.

Conduct routine offensive security testing

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Controlling what your employees can do and the sites they can visit using corporate devices helps limit your organization’s exposure to unwanted and malicious programs and content.

Implement an allowlisting policy and solution

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Lack of preparation puts your organization at risk. Response playbooks prepare you to counter the risk by defining step by step processes and procedures, giving you a head start in responding to different types of threat.

Response playbooks are ready to execute

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Regular vulnerability scans are something you should be doing regularly. But don’t be fooled: organizations need a more routine schedule of offensive testing. This is a different level of intensity. This is especially true when it comes to ransomware simulations, which help you uncover your weaknesses and strengths before you ever face a real-life ransomware attack.

Conduct routine offensive testing

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The worst way to discover a security gap or a new vulnerability is when a threat actor finds it first.

Gaps, what gaps?

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Developing playbooks for different types of threat and incident helps you respond quickly and efficiently, contributing to effective incident response.

Develop ready to execute incident response playbooks

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Detecting threats is essential. But without defined steps for reacting to different types of event or alert, your defensive security posture lacks maturity.

You lack defined playbooks

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Ensure your security solutions help your team focus on prioritized threats and facilitate swift action, rather than wasting valuable time chasing false positives.

FOCUS ON THE SIGNAL, NOT THE NOISE

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Backups should always be stored where they cannot be damaged by a ransomware incident.

Maintain offline data backups

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Ransomware attacks are pervasive, and having an impact. Readiness is essential to ransomware mitigation.

The Long Road Ahead to Ransomware Preparedness

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Move across the game board to acquire insightful knowledge about safeguarding against ransomware cyber attacks! Discovering these strategies will equip you with the advantages of fortifying your defenses, promptly detecting threats, and swiftly responding to mitigate the impact of ransomware incidents. To begin, spin the wheel below.

ENHANCE ACTIVE DIRECTORY SECURITY Assess your Microsoft Active Directory setup and adopt a tiered security model for a structured and secure framework for privileged account management. COMMUNICATE SECURITY POSTURE WITH YOUR BOARD Elevate your security visibility with regular summary reports to your executive staff and board members on current security risks, plans to mitigate, and current resources. FOCUS ON THE SIGNAL, NOT THE NOISE Ensure your security solutions help your team focus on prioritized threats and facilitate swift action, rather than wasting valuable time chasing false positives.

The Growing Threat of Ransomware: How to Mitigate Your Risk

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Learn how to defend against ransomware

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