Ransomware infection is one of the most destructive cybersecurity threats today, leaving a trail of compromised data, operational disruptions, and monetary and reputational losses. While complete immunity against ransomware is a myth, proactive security measures can significantly reduce your risk and mitigate the impact of an attack. The CYRISMA platform can be a powerful ally in this fight, offering a rich set of features to prevent and recover from attacks. In this blog post, we explore best practices for ransomware prevention, and how CYRISMA’s various features work together to create multiple layers of defense against ransomware.
Asset Discovery and Classification
IT asset discovery and classification shine a light on your organization’s digital landscape, revealing your devices, servers, and systems and helping you assess their criticality to your business. This understanding is crucial for ransomware prevention. By identifying all connected assets, you can prioritize addressing security gaps in critical systems and effectively reduce risk to sensitive data. Effective IT asset management isn’t just about inventory; it’s also about building a strong shield against the threat of ransomware.
How CYRISMA helps
- CYRISMA’s network discovery scans empower you to gain control over your IT landscape by identifying all network-connected assets and helping you classify them based on their criticality to your business operations and the sensitivity of the data they store. Network discovery and criticality assessment enable you to prioritize security efforts, focusing resources on safeguarding the most valuable assets first and ultimately making your organization a less attractive target for ransomware actors.
Securing Sensitive Data: Knowing Your Crown Jewels
Ransomware thrives on organizations’ lack of visibility into their widely dispersed on-prem and cloud data. By running data scans to identify your sensitive and business-critical data – wherever it resides – you can create a strong and effective security strategy focused on protecting your crown jewels. Complete visibility enables you to build layered defense with firewalls guarding high-value data, strictly enforced access controls, and backups ready for a quick recovery, ultimately reducing the risk of successful ransomware attacks.
How CYRISMA helps
- Sensitive Data Discovery Scans: CYRISMA uncovers all types of sensitive data across your on-prem systems and cloud environments. These include Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace apps. This comprehensive view ensures no sensitive information remains hidden from protection.
- Data Classification: Once data is found, you can classify it based on sensitivity level (e.g., PII, financial data) and business context. This helps prioritize protection efforts with the most critical assets receiving the most attention.
- Dark Web Value of Sensitive Data: CYRISMA leverages dark web monitoring to assess the potential dark web value of your critical data. This helps prioritize protection based on potential financial risk.
- Encrypting Data Stored in Plaintext: Data Scan results include options to secure exposed data from within the platform. With CYRISMA you can encrypt sensitive data stored in plaintext, significantly reducing the attacker’s leverage in an extortion attempt.
- Modifying Access Permissions: Another risk mitigation action you can take is restricting access to sensitive data based on the principle of least privilege. This minimizes your attack surface and the potential for insider threats.
- Deleting or Moving Data: For data deemed excessively risky or obsolete, CYRISMA enables secure deletion or migration to more secure storage tiers, further reducing the attack surface.
Monitoring the Dark Web: Early Warning System
The dark web acts as a shadowy bazaar for stolen data, including credentials, personal information, and even access to compromised systems. This is where dark web monitoring becomes a crucial line of defense against ransomware. By continuously scanning these hidden corners, you can detect leaks of your sensitive data early on and find your stolen credentials advertised before attackers attempt to use them. This allows you to swiftly change passwords, tighten security measures, and potentially avoid the initial infiltration that paves the way for ransomware deployment. Additionally, monitoring the dark web can reveal early warnings of upcoming attacks, giving you time to prepare and fortify your defenses.
How CYRISMA helps
- Finding IPs, Domains, Emails: With CYRISMA you can proactively scan the dark web for IPs, domains or emails, uncovering potential leaks or targeted attacks before they escalate.
- Tracking Ransomware Forums: The platform monitors underground forums where attackers discuss strategies and sell stolen data, providing valuable intelligence for proactive defense.
- Tracking Marketplaces: By monitoring dark web marketplaces where stolen data is sold, CYRISMA allows you to assess the potential impact of a breach and prepare for recovery.
Managing Vulnerabilities: Patching the Holes
With regular vulnerability scanning and swift patch deployment you can identify and fill security gaps in your IT systems before attackers can slip through. This proactive approach significantly reduces the attack surface for ransomware, making it much harder for it to gain a foothold and encrypt your data. The faster you identify and address these vulnerabilities, the less likely you are to become a victim of a ransomware attack.
How CYRISMA helps
- Vulnerability Scanning: With CYRISMA’s powerful internal, external, agent-based and agentless vulnerability scans you can identify potential entry points for ransomware across your IT environment.
- Prioritizing Vulnerabilities: These scans prioritize vulnerabilities based on exploitability and potential impact, guiding remediation efforts towards the most critical issues.
- Root Cause Analysis: CYRISMA also enables you to go beyond identifying vulnerabilities with its Root Cause Analysis feature, so you can easily see related vulnerabilities and address their root causes.
- Web App Vulnerability Scans: CYRISMA’s vulnerability scans also cover web applications – a frequent target for ransomware attacks – identifying and addressing vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them.
- Patch Deployment: You can patch Windows-based third-party apps from within the CYRISMA platform, ensuring timely application of security updates to close vulnerability windows. For other vulnerabilities, the scan results dashboards include detailed mitigation information and the ability to create mitigation plans and assign tasks to team members for quick and streamlined risk reduction.
Strengthening OS Configuration: Hardening the Foundation
Secure OS configuration acts as a gatekeeper protecting your systems from the threat of ransomware and other damaging cyber attacks. By running secure configuration scans on a regular basis, you can identify weak configuration settings and quickly close entry points for attackers. Spot misconfigurations, lock down unnecessary features, disable risky services, and enforce strong access controls to create a less hospitable environment for ransomware.
How CYRISMA helps
- OS Configuration Scans: CYRISMA’s Secure Configuration scans check operating systems for weak configuration settings that could be exploited by ransomware operators. Scan Linux, Windows and macOS operating systems and compare settings against the CIS Benchmarks and DISA STIGs.
- Mitigation Plans to Harden Operating Systems: The platform’s powerful mitigation engine enables you to create trackable mitigation plans, assign tasks to teams members, set start and end dates, and monitor progress on strengthening OS security.
Monitoring Active Directory: Securing the Identity Hub
Active Directory, the heart of user permissions and access control, is a prime target for ransomware attackers. Ongoing AD monitoring enables you to spot unusual login attempts, privilege escalations, and unauthorized account modifications before an attacker gets deeper into your IT environment and reaches your crown jewels. Additionally, monitoring AD changes allows you to identify and remove inactive or stale accounts, further reducing the attack surface for ransomware.
How CYRISMA helps
- Monitor on-prem and Azure Active Directory: CYRISMA provides a centralized view of both on-premises and cloud-based Active Directory environments.
- View Active and Inactive Users, disabled accounts, registered devices, password history and other AD information, and do a basic clean-up. With easy visibility into your AD environment and the ability to monitor changes, you can detect signs of anomalous activity before it turns into a full-blown breach.
Tracking Compliance with Best Practice Frameworks
Cybersecurity best practice frameworks like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and the CIS Critical Controls lay out roadmaps for effective and streamlined cyber risk reduction with a focus on high-impact controls. They cover essential security program components like asset management, vulnerability management, access control, incident response, and data protection. By regularly assessing your compliance against these frameworks, you can identify cybersecurity weak spots that ransomware could exploit. Monitoring compliance also highlights areas for improvement, prompting you to implement additional security measures like multi-factor authentication or encryption, further hardening your defenses. Remember, consistent adherence to best practices creates a strong security posture that makes it significantly harder for ransomware to infiltrate, exploit vulnerabilities, and encrypt your data.
How CYRISMA helps
- Tactical Compliance Tracker: CYRISMA’s compliance tracker provides an overview of your existing security controls compared against best practice frameworks and data privacy regulations including the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, the CIS Critical Controls, SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS and more. With easy-to-track tactical control checklists, you can ensure that you’re implementing cybersecurity best practices, and fill gaps as needed.
By implementing these essential tactical security controls, you can proactively address the risk of ransomware and significantly reduce the impact of an attack even if you are targeted. From securing sensitive data and monitoring the dark web to managing vulnerabilities and strengthening your IT infrastructure, CYRISMA can help you build an effective and multi-layered defense program against ransomware attacks.