Here are some recommendations from professionals on how to protect your business from ransomware hackers in 2022
Cybercrimes are becoming a widespread and disappointing reality for businesses. Shift to remote work, distant learning, and increased connectivity over the past two years has provided a perfect breeding ground for ransomware attacks. It is imperative to take actionable steps to protect your business against ransomware attacks.
Regularly Monitor Your Network
- Organizations must keep an eye on digital attack surfaces and possible points of access to their networks. Digital attack surfaces encompass Ip addresses, ports, configurations, and other applications. Extend your monitoring capabilities deeper into the network to find out what’s happening. This helps to detect and respond to ransomware attacks before they can get out of hand.
In addition, timely patching helps to rectify any detected vulnerabilities before hackers can exploit them. All applications, devices connected to your network, operating systems, etc. should be included in patching.
Robust Data Backup And Recovery Plan
- Backups allow organizations to get their data back from a backup without having to negotiate ransom payments. However, cybercriminals can also target data backups. Organizations must protect their backups by following a 3-2-1 backup strategy.
Have three copies of your sensitive data, store two in different media, and keep one offsite. This can help reduce the impact of ransomware attacks and allow you to quickly rebuild your servers and workstations after an attack.
Educate Your Employees
- Despite the advancement in technology, gaps in cybersecurity education remain common in several organizations. Better, more strategic cybersecurity education is needed to start closing these education gaps. Approaches such as the use of a fully-managed training platform make it easier to spread awareness among employees. The focus of these education programs should be on engagement of the employees.
Account Management
- Compromised credentials are another source of initial intrusions into networks. They result from gaps in cybersecurity education and awareness. Once hackers gain access to an organization’s network, ineffective user account management makes things easier for them. Poor user account management turns things worse as it allows users to abuse privileged accounts by installing ransomware across multiple systems.
Therefore, it is crucial to manage the use of privileged accounts. Restricting users’ ability to install software applications on network devices, would help limit the network’s exposure to ransomware attacks.
Effective Network Segmentation
- Network segmentation can be done by dividing your organization’s network into smaller sub-networks. This is done to limit the traffic between different zones. It reduces the lateral movement between zones and reduces the attack surface. Even if an attack bypasses the perimeter, network segmentation can prevent it from intruding on other network zones. This ultimately protects your endpoints from being encrypted.
Scan And Filter Emails
- Emails are one of the biggest entry points into a business network and cybercriminals are consistently targeting emails. Attackers can send a seemingly legitimate attachment, which when opened by the employee installs a remote access trojan into their device. This eventually kicks off a ransomware attack. Scanning and filtering are effective ways to identify and filter out these malicious emails before they are opened by employees.
Utilize SIEM Tool
Security information & event manager (SIEM) is a centralized tool. It collects, correlates, and analyzes data from various applications and security solutions in the organization’s IT environment to provide holistic cybersecurity insights. SIEM enables organizations to quickly detect and respond to ransomware attacks using otherwise unavailable insights.
If you are interested in protecting your business or company from many cyber security threats, you can call Micro Strategies at their toll-free number, 888-467-6588. We are a company that specializes in business, IT, and security solutions. We are located in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New England, and New York. Our team will assess your business and recommend a fantastic plan that best meets your business needs.