Ransomware Prevention or Recovery: What Should be Your Prime Focus

Ransomware Prevention or Recovery: What Should be Your Prime Focus

Ransomware is a cyberspace attack where some hacker or attacker may hijack your systems. The only way to get your plans back up and running is by paying the attacker a ransom. This ransom may range from pure cash to digital currency. Nowadays, the digital currency has been running fast because of its feature of being untraceable. But if, as a business, you are supposed to work towards understanding what is to be done with these ransomware attacks, what would you do? Would you opt for prevention? Would you opt for recovery? What is it that you would want assistance in? To help you make that decision, in this blog, we bring you information and research regarding what would work best and why.

What is a Ransomware Attack?

A ransomware attack is a kind of attack where a system may get infiltrated by malware. This malware then takes the entire system hostage. These attacks are primarily made through the assistance of Trojan horses or backdoor entrances. When a system gets infiltrated by malware, it won’t function. It will take a hit, and it won’t work. Now, to recover the plans, one has to either pay the hacker a ransom or go ahead and reach out to other agencies to safeguard their systems and recover their systems. Now that you have completely understood what a ransomware attack looks like let us also understand the prevention and recovery methods of such attacks and which would work the best for your business?

How Much Does a Ransomware Cost?

According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach 2021 report, the average cost of a data breach is $4.24 million. But what’s the actual price of a ransomware attack? Well, it can vary broadly. The costs can be only a few thousand and even go up to millions. Several factors contribute to the actual costs of ransomware. These include the sum asked by the attackers in the form of ransom and the additional costs. Some of these extra costs include:

• Loss of Revenue: You cannot run your business when your systems are down. This leads to a loss of productivity, which directly impacts the revenue.
• Reputational Damage: A business losses trust of stakeholders and customers following an attack.
• Closures: The financial and brand damage caused by an attack can also lead to a complete shutdown.

The bigger the company, the more the number of assets compromised, the higher is the cost of the attack. We have already seen this over the years. The news and costs of a ransomware attack spread wildly. One such example from March 2021 is CNA Financial. The seventh-largest commercial issuer in the USA was attacked by the Phoenix group that used Phoenix Locker ransomware. The company had to pay $40 million in ransom to get back the data.

Another famous example is WannaCry from 2017. The ransomware group affected over 200,000 computers globally. The demand for decrypting each computer was $300 initially, which was increased to $600 later, taking the total estimated loss of around $4 billion. Kaseya is also a great example of ransomware damage. The attack on the company impacted around 1,500 organizations globally. REvil, the ransomware group behind the attack, demanded ransom from Kaseya and the 1,500 organizations. It is unclear how many companies paid the ransom, but Kaseya was requested $70 million in bitcoin.

These high costs of ransomware attacks make it essential to protect your organization from such an attack.

What is Ransomware Prevention?

Ransomware prevention refers to the process of deploying the necessary security measures to protect your organization from a breach. Some standard measures include training your employees not to open spam emails. The increasing use of emails for professional communication has made them a go-to target for attackers who can use them as a means to deploy ransomware attacks. Similarly, you should also release systems patches at regular intervals, deploy advanced endpoint security solutions, and use complex and unique passwords combinations.

Moreover, you should also leverage round-the-clock monitoring for securing your business ecosystem as attackers don’t have any specific working hours. Conducting thorough threat hunting is also vital to be proactive in your security efforts. You should seek assistance from cybersecurity vendors like SharkStriker, which uses advanced threat research labs to analyze triage data and other valuable data to develop correlation rules for real-time threat detection. But in case an adversary is able to penetrate your systems, you should also have the right incident response plan in place to contain and remediate the attack.

One of the best ways to go about ransomware prevention is by deploying Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) along with Managed Detection and Response (MDR). These security tools can help prevent ransomware attacks at pre-breach levels. 24/7 MDR services offered by vendors like SharkStrikers can help monitor your business ecosystem constantly to find any deviations and Indicators of Risks (IOR) to prevent potential attacks.

Tips to Prevent Ransomware Attacks

Everyone is a potential target in today’s small world. Hence, you need to follow the essential prevention tips to protect your company from ransomware attacks. Here are some tips that you can follow.

Email Security Monitoring

Emails are used as a way of professional communication by almost all organizations worldwide. Therefore, it is also a great target for cyber attackers. You need to constantly monitor the emails coming and going from your business. It will allow you to quickly detect threats and remediate them before they become a major threat.

Firewall Implementation and Monitoring

A firewall installation is a must because it acts as the base defense for your company. It helps monitor the web traffic to identify risks. If you install a new application or API, firewalls can help ensure they access or receive data only from legit sources. But implementing a firewall alone is not good enough. Today, many cyber attackers are using sophisticated tactics that can easily outperform standard firewalls. Hence, firewall implementation should be coupled with 24/7 monitoring. Cybersecurity experts with the help of machine learning algorithms should constantly keep a watch on the web traffic for optimal security.

Endpoint Protection

As we move towards a remote workforce model, the endpoint devices are no longer limited within your company boundaries. Employees use their devices to access business data. Moreover, the increase in endpoints due to technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) is causing more challenges. Hence, endpoint protection has become even more essential. You need to monitor and protect all the endpoints constantly. If you don’t have the right resources for that, you should leverage Managed Detection and Response (MDR) from a reputed Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP).

Incident Response

Ransomware prevention isn’t always about your preparation before an attack. You can also prevent an attack from becoming disastrous after it is initiated with the help of an effective incident response. You should have a response plan in place for quick remediation so that an attack can be contained before it becomes dangerous for your company.

Zero-Trust Implementation

The zero-trust cybersecurity model is one of the essential tips to prevent most of the top threats of 2022. As the name gives out, it refers to not trusting anyone with your data. Thus, you should authenticate anyone and everyone before giving access to any sensitive information.

User Training and Cybersecurity Hygiene

Human error is the top cybersecurity threat for any business. If your employees are not aware of the latest tactics used by attackers, they can become easy prey. Hence, you should train your employees to detect breach attempts. It should also include first-responder training.

What is Ransomware Recovery?

If you have been a victim of a ransomware attack, there is a high possibility that the hacker has already taken your money and not left your systems solved. In such a case, you will have to contact experts. These experts usually assist in creating a secure network of systems for them to get up and running. Furthermore, when you are recovering from such attacks, often, the process just gets lengthier and lengthier by the day and ends up costing too much for a company. To avoid such instances, a customer needs to get in touch with truly trained professionals to help remove the viruses from the system in a fraction of time and at reduced costs.

How can SharkStriker Help Your Business?

As we have seen, ransomware recovery costs are significantly higher than prevention. Hence, it is evident that you should prevent any attack on your company. But ransomware prevention can be overwhelming as you require investments in security tools. Even the security products or tools are not enough; you will also have to hire the right expertise who can use the tools optimally to secure your business environment. That’s where MSSPs like SharkStriker come into the picture.

SharkStriker is comprehensive cybersecurity service-providing firm. We have our SOCs spread across several regions to ensure 24/7 monitoring of your assets and the overall IT infrastructure. Our cybersecurity experts leverage our machine-accelerated MDR platform to provide a hands-on keyboard-based response. The MDR platform is a white-labeled solution, built using an open-architecture platform that can easily integrate with your existing solutions to extract data from all the sources and provide better visibility on your business ecosystem to prevent ransomware attacks.

Conclusion

One common thing amongst ransomware attacks is that they will cost you money, a lot of it. To understand which one works better for you, we believe it is a simple choice, opt for protection. This is because the costs of prevention are far lesser than recovery. SharkStriker help in creating a point-to-point safety network and also help in understanding attacker patterns to prevent the same at a fraction of the cost of recovery. To understand the exact requirements and how SharkStriker can help you with ransomware prevention and recovery, we urge you to contact us. One of our representatives shall demonstrate how our Managed Security Services can protect your organization from cyber-attacks.