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Who Does Ransomware Target?

Ransomware attacks are no longer affecting enterprises only. They’re spreading to organizations of all sizes, maturities, and even across industries. Why? It’s profitable.

Many mid-market businesses have a false sense of security that ransomware attacks only happen to big corporations with millions to pay in ransom. But both enterprise and mid-market companies have valuable data attackers can hold for ransom.

How Do I Protect My Business?

(LINK) Protect your business using the 5 Ps of Preparedness approach:

1. Program. Work with IT to align your cybersecurity program with your ransomware strategy to minimize the operational and financial impact of a ransomware incident.
2. Policy. Work with leadership and the board to create a policy that explains how you will approach ransomware, including if your business will attempt to make a payment.
3. Plan. Your plan should be concise, comprehensive, and simple. Who will provide external support, who will you empower to make decisions, and who will execute your plan?
4. People. Identify strategic partners within your organization and external parties and clearly define their roles, inform them of their responsibility, and document their contact information.
5. Practice. Consistently test your ransomware strategy to understand your ability to organize, execute, and improve response capabilities. This will ensure your preparedness.

What is the Ransomware Lifecycle?

Understand the ransomware lifecycle to prepare for and resolve it as quickly as possible. 

1. Infection. Ransomware finds its way into corporate assets through phishing emails, a misconfigured cloud asset, and the exploitation of your open vulnerabilities.
2. Communication. Ransomware communicates back to its control network, where attackers determine how they’ll attack your network.
3. Discovery. Built-in mechanisms discover specific types of sensitive information for ransom, identify defensive measures, and help attackers maximize their impact.
4. Data exfiltration and backup destruction. Ransomware components silently corrupt and disable backups and steal sensitive information.
5. Encryption. Attackers silently and selectively encrypt your data, making your systems and data useless without decryption.
6. Ransom demand. Ransomware attackers make ransom demands (typically in Bitcoin) to get your data back.
7. Negotiation. Some ransomware attackers will negotiate.
8. Decryption. You can pay the ransom to get the decryption keys, but there’s no guarantee attackers won’t leak or re-encrypt your data.

Top 3 Initial Infection Vectors

• Phishing emails
• Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) exploitation
• Software vulnerabilities exploitation

How Can Technology Help?

Apply a zero-trust security strategy to empower your security teams and leadership to move faster and more securely. At its core, zero trust believes we should not inherently trust any interaction, at any level. It focuses on setting up systems and applications that protect themselves from every other system, allowing them to defend against attacks by minimizing the impact of any single compromise or attack.  

NIST CSF

Five areas of the NIST CSF to include if your cybersecurity and ransomware strategy:

1. Identify. Operationalized identification, detection, and classification of critical and sensitive data
2. Protect. Data and individual asset protection that prevent known threats and attack patterns
3. Detect. Operationalized cyber attack and malicious software detection
4. Respond. Integrated technology platforms that detect ransomware rapidly to contain it
5. Recover. Recovery strategy that can scale

Conclusion

Are you prepared to defend against ransomware attacks? At Lightstream, we have helped customers build effective strategies to empower them to fight against ransomware attacks, and we can do the same for you.

We’ll assess your current strategies, build upon them, and help you mitigate as much risk as possible by preparing for and setting up the proper technologies to fight ransomware attacks.