How to Protect Against Ransomware Attacks

It’s more important than ever to protect against ransomware. Cybercriminals are having a field day targeting business and government IT infrastructures. You can no longer assume that these criminals only go after weak or poorly secured targets because that is simply no longer the case.

In order to keep your business, your customers, and your employees safe from the prospect of ransomware attacks, you need to fully understand the threat and implement a sophisticated solution that reduces the risk to your business. That solution must also provide a sure path to recovery should you find that your best efforts to avoid an attack have still failed. (WEBINAR replay below)

The New Era of Ransomware

How many news stories will be watched before the message of how this new ransomware is different and more damaging sinks in? Cybercriminals are patient and intelligent, and they use increasingly sophisticated techniques. They’re not just lazily sending out links and seeing what works for them; they learn about the companies, or the government entities they target and their specific networks. They price out the ransom in the same way an ordinary IT vendor might. After biding their time, they strike when the company or municipality is most vulnerable and least able to respond competently or decisively. This increases the pressure on the victim to pay the ransom because they’re caught entirely off guard. And furthermore, once one ransom has been paid, that entity becomes a bigger target for future attacks.

How to Protect Your Employees and Business from Ransomware Attacks

Let’s look at some of the specific steps your business can take to avoid ransomware using a combination of best practices and Enhanced Data Protection. We’ll start with the low-hanging fruit, the basics, and then detail how our next level of DRaaS and cybersecurity solution provides you with the confidence to know your data is safe with a quick video recap of a conversation our CEO and CIO recently shared with Petri at VeeamON 2019.

Adopt a ‘Not If, But When’ Mentality

The scale of threats to every company’s biggest asset, its data, is now undeniable. Your business is going to be targeted at some point. While you can’t stop a hacker from trying to penetrate your systems, you can stop the attacks from being successful or impactful. Making your employees aware that the business is likely to be targeted should help to keep them more alert to the threat.

Minimize Insider Threat – Restrict Abilities and Privileges

Restricting your systems to least privilege access can be helpful. Assess user roles and evaluate who needs access to platforms and data. Limit admin roles to only the most highly trained and reliable staff.

Employee Training on Cybersecurity

The first and perhaps the most important thing for you to do is to educate and train the entire organization on how to recognize a phishing attack or other suspect online activity. When they understand how to spot and avoid these pitfalls, you’ve already raised your shield.

Patching and Keep Devices Updated

Outdated devices or software creates vulnerabilities so a routine update for all company and personal devices connected to your network is imperative. Devices are less exploitable when they have the newest version in place. Those annoying software updates incorporate fixes and patches that relate to security. Having a proper patching program is critical.

Undertake a Security Checkup

A routine threat assessment should be part of every IT department’s SOP. Examine where your own vulnerabilities may be, internally or with suppliers, and spin up your recovery environment to ensure that it contains all of your company’s data. Having an assessment by an external company provides a fresh set of eyes to see where insider threats exist or a hacker’s point of entry may be.

Backup and Recovery Plans

If you’re confident that you have a clean backup and recovery plan in place, there’s considerably less pressure to meet a ransomware payment demand. Here’s how Global Data Vault utilizes Veeam and Enhanced Data Protection to provide a fully managed defense against today’s cybercrimes.

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If you’d like to learn more about the threats to your business and how to protect it, watch the replay of our webinar where we discuss:

• What is the “insider threat”?
• What the current malware threat is and how insider access is used against targets
• How to protect against insider attacks effectively

Ransomware attacks are becoming more common and more sophisticated, so be sure to stay up to date with how the tactics of cybercriminals are changing and developing over time if you can. That way, you’ll be able to stay ahead of the curve and get better at protecting your business and its employees.

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