The reality is that your company is going to be the victim of a ransomware attack based on statistics and the increasing cyber attacks making the headlines.
There seems to be a report of a new ransomware attack every day. Non-profits, charities, and businesses have been cyber attacked and victim of a ransomware attack. There has been a significantly large amount of disruption caused by the cyber-attacks, affecting governments, businesses, and individuals worldwide.
Ransomware is a top security priority for most businesses, and they devote a great deal of time and energy to preventing attacks or from becoming a victim of a ransomware attack. Cyber-attacks are not decreasing, they are increasing at an alarming rate. The reason for this is partly due to the advantages held by bad cyber-criminal actors and substantial financial incentives for them to continue cyber attacking.
This is also due to the constant change in cyber-attack vectors, making defense more difficult for organizations. There is no single tool that can defend against phishing, hijacked websites, infected supply chains, and disgruntled employees. Cyber criminals are constantly changing their tactics faster than new defensive tools can be developed.
Instead of organizations trying to merely prevent cyber-attacks, they should focus more on how they will respond when one occurs.
There are three components to preparing for attacks: training, technology, and risk management.
Create a Plan
By combining proactive training, latest technology, and risk management, an organization can stay ahead of cyber threats. If an organization does not have a good plan for coping with ransomware or any other cyber-attack, they will not know who is responsible for what when it occurs.
It may not be possible to recover from a ransomware attack quickly however if your organization has a plan and make sure everyone in your organization knows their part, their time offline can be reduced drastically. It is impossible to know how effective and efficient a plan is without testing it. If a cyber security disaster strikes your organization, you don’t want to learn the hard way.
Build resilience into your plan
Even a well-practiced plan will not work if it states something like we need to manually re-image every machine our employees use at home, and no one will be able to use it until it is finished. The latest technology tools will be critical in the recovery process.
The latest technology tools will allow remote actions on your endpoints that will enable you to remove the cyber-attacks as well as restore the applications and data. The most important attribute of those tools is that they are resilient. Not necessarily resistant, but resilient. Resilience is about the ability to bound back up when knocked down.
When dealing with cyber-attacks, the most reliable and effective way to remove malware is to reinstall the operating system and start from scratch. Many of the latest technology tools out there will automatically reinstall themselves after the entire disk has been wiped. If your organization has installed tools like this in advance, you can install, and restore if you are ever faced with a crippling cyber-attack.
Managing risk through recovery
Risk management is the final component of the equation and just as important. The critical factor is that it must be done in advance. Having planned for a cyber-attack forces organizations to think about how to minimize the risk an organization faces when one of their machines is breached.
Zero-trust architecture is based on this premise. Machines, services, and networks cannot be implicitly trusted because they will all be compromised eventually. A strategy to minimize the likelihood that an infection on one machine will cause a problem on another.
Don’t let yourself become the next victim of a ransomware attack. Know your key risks. Minimize risk by making strategic decisions. Educate your team. Plan ahead. Don’t be a victim of a ransomware attack.
365 iT SOLUTIONS is federally certified by the Canadian federal government under the CyberSecure Canada program.
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365 iT SOLUTIONS is a leading IT consulting firm in Toronto that offers Managed IT Services, Tech Support Services, Cloud Services, Managed Security Services, IT Support Services, IT Outsourcing Services, Business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR), and Cyber Security Training and Dark Web Monitoring.
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