Akron Ransomware Filtering and Restoration Expertise

Ransomware has become the weapon of choice for the major cyber-crime organizations and bad-actor governments, posing a potentially lethal risk to companies that fall victim. The latest versions of crypto-ransomware target all vulnerable resources, including online backup, making even selective recovery a challenging and expensive exercise. Novel strains of crypto-ransomware like Ryuk, Maze, Sodinokibi, Netwalker, DopplePaymer, Snatch and Egregor have emerged, replacing Locky, TeslaCrypt, and NotPetya in notoriety, elaborateness, and destructiveness.

90% of ransomware infections are the result of innocuous-seeming emails that have dangerous hyperlinks or attachments, and many are "zero-day" variants that elude detection by legacy signature-based antivirus filters. Although user training and frontline identification are important to protect your network against ransomware, best practices dictate that you expect that some attacks will eventually get through and that you prepare a strong backup mechanism that allows you to restore files and services quickly with little if any losses.

Progent's ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report is an ultra-affordable service built around a remote interview with a Progent cybersecurity expert skilled in ransomware defense and recovery. In the course of this assessment Progent will work with your Akron IT management staff to collect pertinent information about your security posture and backup environment. Progent will use this data to produce a Basic Security and Best Practices Report detailing how to follow best practices for implementing and managing your security and backup solution to prevent or clean up after a ransomware attack.

Progent's Basic Security and Best Practices Report highlights vital areas associated with ransomware defense and restoration recovery. The review covers:

Cybersecurity

• Proper use of admin accounts
• Appropriate NTFS and SMB (Server Message Block) permissions
• Proper firewall configuration
• Safe RDP configuration
• Recommend AntiVirus (AV) tools identification and configuration

• Split permission architecture for backup protection
• Protecting key servers including AD
• Geographically dispersed backups with cloud backup to Microsoft Azure

About Ransomware
Ransomware is a variety of malicious software that encrypts or deletes a victim's files so they are unusable or are made publicly available. Ransomware sometimes locks the target's computer. To avoid the carnage, the victim is required to pay a specified ransom, typically via a crypto currency such as Bitcoin, within a brief time window. It is not guaranteed that paying the ransom will recover the lost files or avoid its exposure to the public. Files can be encrypted or erased throughout a network depending on the victim's write permissions, and you cannot break the military-grade encryption technologies used on the hostage files. A typical ransomware attack vector is spoofed email, whereby the user is lured into interacting with by means of a social engineering exploit known as spear phishing. This makes the email to appear to come from a trusted source. Another popular attack vector is an improperly protected RDP port.

The ransomware variant CryptoLocker ushered in the new age of crypto-ransomware in 2013, and the damage caused by different strains of ransomware is estimated at billions of dollars annually, more than doubling every other year. Famous examples are Locky, and NotPetya. Recent high-profile threats like Ryuk, Sodinokibi and TeslaCrypt are more elaborate and have caused more havoc than older strains. Even if your backup/recovery procedures enable your business to recover your encrypted files, you can still be threatened by exfiltration, where ransomed documents are exposed to the public (known as "doxxing"). Because additional variants of ransomware crop up every day, there is no guarantee that conventional signature-matching anti-virus filters will block the latest attack. If threat does appear in an email, it is critical that your users have been taught to be aware of social engineering techniques. Your last line of protection is a sound scheme for scheduling and retaining offsite backups plus the deployment of dependable recovery platforms.

Contact Progent About the ProSight Crypto-Ransomware Vulnerability Consultation in Akron
For pricing information and to learn more about how Progent's ProSight Crypto-Ransomware Vulnerability Assessment can bolster your defense against ransomware in Akron, phone Progent at 800-462-8800 or visit Contact Progent.