Building a Resilient Defense When Facing Ransomware Threats

By Nazy Fouladirad, president and COO, Tevora.

Knowing which cybersecurity threats pose the biggest danger to your business can be a tricky task. Even the smallest security incidents involving critical systems can result in large-scale disruptions and costly expenses when trying to resume normal operations.

One form of cybercrime that businesses encounter on a regular basis that has the capability of crippling critical systems and applications is ransomware. These cyberattacks are highly sophisticated in both their design and their orchestration. The simple act of visiting a webpage or opening an infected file can quickly bring a business to a standstill.

To mitigate the impact of ransomware threats, proactive security planning is essential. Below are some important best practices you can follow to reduce your attack surface and lower your chances of becoming a target.

Minimizing Vulnerabilities at the User Level

Every device used to access your company’s systems or networks is known as an “endpoint.” While every organization has several endpoints that require management, companies with remote employees tend to have a much higher volume that requires regular monitoring and protection.

With fully remote and hybrid working arrangements increasing the average number of endpoints businesses have to manage, the potential for bad actors to exploit these connections also increases. 

To mitigate these risks, the organization’s perimeter security needs to be thoroughly evaluated to identify and protect any potential entry points. After this is accomplished, companies can use a combination of Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) systems and access control measures to reduce the chances of unauthorized individuals posing as legitimate users.

Additionally, enforcing personal device usage policies is also essential to improving cybersecurity posture. These policies outline specific measures that employees should follow while using personal devices to conduct company business. This may include avoiding open public internet connections, locking devices when unattended, and updating software and firmware regularly.

Educating Your Team on Password Best Practices

Your employees are key assets to preventing ransomware attacks, even if they don’t realize it. Using weak login credentials, coupled with limited password management practices, leads to a high probability of organizational security becoming compromised.

As convenient as using easy-to-remember passwords may be for a user, businesses need to educate employees and enforce certain best practices when maintaining company credentials. Establishing strong password protocols is essential to maintaining security. Employees should be required to update their credentials periodically throughout the year and avoid reusing passwords across multiple platforms to reduce the risk of compromise.

Building a Reliable Recovery System

Creating regular copies of databases and infrastructure configurations is a critical step to increasing the digital resilience of any organization. In the event that your operations face a malicious attack and assets become encrypted, reliable backups help you to bring your systems back online more efficiently. While system restoration may still take some time, it is a much more reliable solution than trying to pay a ransom demand.

A widely recognized guideline for structuring your backup strategy is the 3-2-1 rule. This recommends:

• Always keep three up-to-date backup files of critical data
  
• Use two different storage formats (internal and/or external)
  
• Keep at least one copy of the data stored outside your business infrastructure

Following this advice reduces your chances of all backups being compromised during an attack and improves your chances of successful recovery.

Creating Secure Zones Within Your Infrastructure

Decentralizing your network into smaller segments helps when containing the rapid spreading of ransomware. This ensures that a compromised system doesn’t automatically allow a bad actor to freely navigate the entire system. Creating secure network zones helps to limit potential damage and gives response teams more time to address the issue.

Strict user access management is also important for reducing your risk exposure. These measures restrict the amount of open access a person has to a system at any given time. This makes it easier to track access levels if employees leave the company and minimize the amount of data exposure with all employees.

Improving Security Through Proactive Testing

As your organization grows, there becomes a need for additional security protections as your digital footprint expands. Still, it’s important to remember that the measures you put in place won’t necessarily stay as effective over the long term. This is why proactive security testing is so important.

However, for many companies, trying to find security weaknesses across a larger underlying infrastructure can be very resource-intensive. Penetration testing services are a great way to help address this challenge.

Pentesting can help organizations identify where various security mechanisms may be failing. By conducting simulated attack scenarios, these ethical hacking teams isolate critical weaknesses that can lead to a data breach. Once receiving a report back from the team, organizations can then prioritize filling high-priority security gaps that could lead to increased attack susceptibility or costly data security and compliance issues.

Maintaining Compliance and Building Customer Trust

Aside from operational disruptions, ransomware can lead to compromised client and customer data security, which can cause serious legal and reputational harm.

Using strong encryption on all of your critical company data is imperative for reducing this risk. This process makes it difficult for any unauthorized person to access information without the necessary encryption keys. While this step may not eliminate all chances of data being accessed, it will go a long way in preventing the illegal trading of this information on dark web markets. 

When trying to maintain customer trust, it’s also important to remember that although there is a greater reliance on AI-powered security systems, certain regulatory and ethical considerations need to be taken into consideration. This includes being transparent with customers regarding how these solutions may use their data and how their information will stay protected.

Build a Stronger Defense Against Ransomware

It’s important to maintain a proactive approach when protecting your business from ransomware threats. By following the provided guidelines, you’ll ensure that your organization is less susceptible to these attacks moving forward and that you have effective response plans in place to help you recover if necessary.