Ransomware strikes every business either big or small but what’s more important is to know how to respond to these attacks so as to minimize the associated costs, what necessary steps you should ensure, and what are the tips and the best practices for ransomware protection. First of all, let’s see what ransomware attack is and why it’s so dreadful to a business.

What are the Ransomware Attacks?

Ransomware attacks have surged a lot during the last couple of years. Ransomware is malicious software that can easily encrypt and can get control over computer systems. This form of attack scrambles important data with virtually-unbreakable encryption and does not retrieve the data unless a ransom is paid. Once such an attack hits a network’s perimeter and penetrates through its defenses, it gets replicated without being detected and causes unbearable damage throughout the network. Ransomware has a kill chain that is followed to attack security defenses. Conventional security defenses rely on simple features like signatures, rules, and pattern matching stuff, which are easily hit by ransomware. Its most basic attack involves encryption malware which at first encrypts data and applications and then hardware and finally, it extorts the owner’s encrypted assets to make a financial transaction. Ransomware can spread all over the company’s network leading to tragic downtime. At times, the impacts are catastrophic and often lead to bankruptcy. Ransomware attacks are usually accompanied by phishing attacks. These attacks may include sending a malicious email attachment or a URL to an unauthentic website or an app containing a virus. At large, these attacks target businesses and the encrypted network causes the company’s operations to cease. In 2016, ransomware attacks have impacted millions of end-users and its cost victims were reported to be more than $1 billion.

Losses attributed to Ransomware attacks

According to the survey from Emsisoft, in 2019, approximately 85 educational institutes, 700 healthcare organizations were hit by ransomware attacks. Recently, Texas school districts also lost $2.3 million that was a colossal loss. Baltimore spent $18 million to address all the damages, caused by 2019’s attack. In the past years, the most devastating impacts were observed for WannaCry and Petya outbreaks that affected thousands of end-users. It locked down systems of large enterprises across the world and the hackers didn’t even build a way to retrieve the lost data. Ransomware will continue to evolve and to counteract it, IT security professionals must be equally proactive and must adopt efficient practices to combat these attacks. Now, let’s look up the best practices to prevent ransomware from propagating in the network.

Regular backup of important documents

With the regular backup of important files and documents, one can reduce the effects of ransomware attacks. If the data is backed up safely then even ransomware data attacks can’t do much harm since you already had a backup of accessible data. Always, implement the 3-2-1 rule which proposes that you must backup your data at 3 different locations with 3 different formats and one location should be off-site. These backups must be checked regularly for their accessibility because if it’s not accessible then there is no use for it.

Regularly update OS and its software’s

By keeping the operating system and its programs updated, one can prevent ransomware attacks that take advantage of security flaws and vulnerabilities in the system. Wannacry outbreak is an example of when ransom hackers exploited security flaws allowing it to propagate like wildfire across a network of computers.

Provide enough access to end-users

Cyber hackers exploit legitimate utilities and administration tools to install and run malware in the system. It provides them access to steal the data with convenience. These kinds of attacks can be restricted by providing end-users enough access to execute a task. This way attackers will have less privilege to target the network.

Protect the network and servers

Protection of servers is also important along with the network security as a single vulnerability can lead to an immense loss. Servers should be regularly patched and updated. Remote desktop credentials must be protected against brute force attacks, this can be done by implementing a multi-factor authentication feature. Malware attacks can also be limited by implementing network segmentation which provides users the resources that are specific to them. This prevents hackers to propagate within a network.

Secure your gateways

The email gateway is the most common approach of attackers. Spam emails that direct to a compromised website causes data stealth. Security against these socially engineered emails is important and requires a deep understanding of their arrival tricks. Similarly, to protect web gateway, implement URL categorization, remove browser plugins and update third party components such as Java, Flash, etc

How AI protects against ransomware attacks

Artificial Intelligence is considered as a pivot point of a technological revolution in this modern era. The main objective behind Artificial Intelligence is to make machines capable of comprehending and performing human actions/decisions through a series of advanced programming. Cyber Artificial intelligence is helping under-resourced security operations analysts ahead of threats. To get protection from ransomware attacks, security software incorporating AI is used to detect and resolve the attacked files. These AI models are designed in such a way that they recognize the difference between clean and suspicious files.

NetworkFort is providing security against Ransomware:

Ransomware attacks can be mitigated by deploying an efficient and smart security system that can work one step ahead of cybercriminals. NetworkFort’s tool NetworkFort can block all these ransomware attacks and prevent them from entering the network system. This NetworkFort is an AI-powered security provider that provides complete security against these spiteful cyber-attacks. With its endpoint protection feature, it causes hindrance to all the suspicious files and sends them back to their initial point. For further details, please visit our website http://www.networkfort.com