Dayton Ransomware Protection and Remediation Consulting

Ransomware has been weaponized by cybercriminals and bad-actor governments, representing a potentially lethal risk to businesses that fall victim. Modern strains of ransomware go after everything, including online backup, making even partial restoration a complex and costly process. Novel versions of ransomware like Ryuk, Maze, Sodinokibi, Mailto (aka Netwalker), Phobos, LockBit and Egregor have made the headlines, displacing WannaCry, TeslaCrypt, and Petya in notoriety, sophistication, and destructive impact.

90% of ransomware infections are the result of innocuous-seeming emails that have malicious hyperlinks or file attachments, and many are so-called "zero-day" variants that elude detection by legacy signature-matching antivirus filters. Although user education and up-front detection are important to defend your network against ransomware, leading practices demand that you take for granted some malware will inevitably succeed and that you deploy a solid backup solution that permits you to repair the damage quickly with minimal losses.

Progent's ProSight Ransomware Vulnerability Checkup is a low-cost service built around a remote interview with a Progent cybersecurity consultant experienced in ransomware defense and recovery. During this interview Progent will cooperate directly with your Dayton IT managers to gather pertinent data concerning your security posture and backup processes. Progent will utilize this data to produce a Basic Security and Best Practices Assessment documenting how to adhere to best practices for implementing and administering your security and backup solution to prevent or recover from a ransomware attack.

Progent's Basic Security and Best Practices Report highlights vital issues related to crypto-ransomware prevention and restoration recovery. The report covers:

Security

• Effective allocation and use of admin accounts
• Assigning NTFS and SMB permissions
• Optimal firewall configuration
• Secure Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connections
• Advice about AntiVirus (AV) filtering identification and configuration

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

About Ransomware
Ransomware is a variety of malware that encrypts or deletes a victim's files so they are unusable or are made publicly available. Crypto-ransomware often locks the victim's computer. To prevent the carnage, the target is required to pay a specified ransom, typically in the form of a crypto currency such as Bitcoin, within a brief time window. It is never certain that paying the extortion price will recover the lost data or avoid its publication. Files can be altered or deleted throughout a network based on the target's write permissions, and you cannot reverse engineer the strong encryption algorithms used on the compromised files. A common ransomware delivery package is booby-trapped email, whereby the target is tricked into responding to by means of a social engineering exploit known as spear phishing. This causes the email to appear to come from a trusted sender. Another common vulnerability is an improperly secured Remote Desktop Protocol port.

The ransomware variant CryptoLocker opened the new age of ransomware in 2013, and the damage attributed to by the many versions of ransomware is estimated at billions of dollars annually, more than doubling every other year. Notorious attacks include WannaCry, and Petya. Recent headline variants like Ryuk, DoppelPaymer and CryptoWall are more sophisticated and have wreaked more havoc than older versions. Even if your backup processes enable your business to recover your encrypted data, you can still be threatened by exfiltration, where ransomed data are made public (known as "doxxing"). Because additional variants of ransomware crop up daily, there is no certainty that traditional signature-matching anti-virus tools will block the latest attack. If an attack does show up in an email, it is critical that your end users have learned to identify social engineering tricks. Your ultimate defense is a sound scheme for performing and retaining remote backups and the use of reliable recovery platforms.

Ask Progent About the ProSight Crypto-Ransomware Preparedness Testing in Dayton
For pricing information and to find out more about how Progent's ProSight Ransomware Vulnerability Audit can bolster your protection against crypto-ransomware in Dayton, call Progent at 800-462-8800 or visit Contact Progent.