It’s not surprising that ransomware has seen a significant uptick so far in 2021, with the influx of hybrid and remote workers, and other instabilities caused by the pandemic. What is surprising is that in just the first 6 months of the year, the global attack volume increased by 151%. With the average cost per incident in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, and often when one incident occurs another isn’t far behind, the costs are multiplied. What can be even worse for your business, over and above the monetary expense, is the cost of downtime, which can reach into weeks and even months. When you can’t access data that’s critical to your business, productivity is severely impacted.
If you think your business is prepared for an attack from one of the more than 100 different ransomware strains out there, think again. No matter the size of your organization, the industry you’re in, or the level of security you think you may have, you are vulnerable to an attack. Hackers are looking to exploit these vulnerabilities and bad actors are attacking even backups, which are usually seen as the rescue solution.
With the added levels of complexity needed to protect your data, it’s time to take a closer look at your system security and your security systems.
People and Technology as Part of Ransomware Prevention Checklist
System security and security systems are two very different categories when it comes to having comprehensive security for your entire business. System security is the technology that protects your infrastructure and data. Security systems are your strategies, policies, and people—often overlooked as being vital to a strong security posture.
For example, if you make your users aware of potential threats and how to detect unauthorized access attempts, they can be your first line of defense. Phishing, malware, malicious apps, and other creative ways hackers get into your network can be stopped cold when links aren’t clicked, attachments are deleted, and apps aren’t downloaded.
At the IT level, you need protection from unauthorized network access—whether external or from inside your organization. You must make sure that there are no breaches in applications and operating systems. Access to accounts and data requires effective management. Content filtering should be implemented on web and email content. You need to strengthen security configurations on all devices, including mobile and remote devices. Backups, snapshots, secure data copies, and data replication all need to work dependably. A strategy for business continuity and disaster recovery is essential.
You also need trusted advisors who can help you implement your security strategy and provide the guidance and support necessary for endpoint-to-endpoint protection.
Ransomware Response Checklist
iTBlueprint and NetApp have developed this ransomware prevention checklist to help you see where your level of protection stands now, so you can better determine how to safeguard your data before bad luck strikes.
- Implement robust vulnerability management and patch management.
- Manage the use of privileged accounts and configure access controls correctly.
- Consider protective filtering to prevent execution of unknown programs.
- Implement content filtering to filter out suspicious emails and web content.
- Strengthen the security configuration of your devices, including mobile devices.
- Plan for quick recovery from any incident by making sure you have a solid and proven plan B.
- Assess the readiness of your IT infrastructure and incident response processes by performing ransomware attack simulations.
How Healthy is Your System?
How can you ensure optimized security when you don’t know your system weaknesses? iTBlueprint and NetApp invite you to schedule a system check-up so you know exactly where you can make improvements—from handling capacity to software updates—and fill in the gaps before they become vulnerabilities for your business.
Partners in Protection
As a NetApp Gold Partner, the iTBlueprint team of experienced technicians can help you get the most out of your technology investment. With our decades of combined experience, we can ensure your data and applications are available and performing optimally—from core to cloud.
Although ransomware threats may feel dire, you can take steps to protect your data, your business, and your reputation by putting the right technology in place and having the right partners on your side. iTBlueprint’s NetApp security solutions can help you recover quickly from an attack with minimal impact, and help you prevent ransomware from spreading in the first place.
With NetApp ONTAP data management software you not only get have the ability to detect ransomware, prevent it from spreading, and recover quickly, you can stop day zero attacks and develop an overall ecosystem data protection strategy against ransomware.
NetApp ONTAP provides trusted data protection to prevent data loss and protect your sensitive company information with built-in data security. It also enables you to eliminate business disruption due to failures, maintenance, and site disasters.
Trusted Advisor – Check to That
Not every managed service provider has the experience and skill set that the iTBlueprint Managed Security Services has when it comes to aligning your security strategy and technology. As NetApp security specialists, we’re ready to help you succeed with solutions—including integrations with partnering solutions—to keep your data, your organization, and your employees and customers safe.
iTBlueprint Managed Security Services provide you with the security expertise you require to not only keep up with opportunistic attacks but get ahead of them before they wreak havoc on your business. It takes the burden of managing the updates, status, maintenance, and mitigation of issues off your plate, so you can focus on your business, not worry about your IT.
Instead of just fixing something when it breaks, we take a vested interest in keeping your networks and systems healthy—all the time. Our experienced team will help you align your processes, people, and technology with your security, compliance and risk tolerance goals, to strengthen your cybersecurity posture from core to cloud.
Cyber Incident Response- Firewall Management
- (SIEM) Services
- Advanced Threat Protection
- Email Security
- Data Loss Prevention
- Identity and Access Management
- Log Management
- Network, OS Vulnerability Management
- Web Application Vulnerability Management
- Patch Management
- Scheduled Penetration Test
- PCI ASV Scanning
