Highly damaging, sophisticated ransomware attacks often start small, with a threat actor phishing for user credentials and company information. Even digitally savvy and careful employees may not always recognize when they encounter a security risk. Awareness building and education can involve every team member in protecting your digital systems and assets. Sikich can assist you in designing and rolling out training and cybersecurity best practices to employees as a strong first line of defense.

Ransomware attacks can quickly close off all systems and resources on your network. That includes backups. If you’re already backing up data, user profiles, and applications to the cloud in addition to on-premises systems, that’s an excellent practice you should continue. The Sikich Cybersecurity team can work with you to implement additional backup protection and manage backup and recovery systems so that they’re no longer as vulnerable to ransomware.

In ransomware attacks, threat actors use a variety of techniques to steal passwords, elevate account privileges, and impersonate administrators, which allows them to access to your most sensitive systems and data. You can curtail the damage an attacker can inflict by limiting accounts and user rights. For example, minimize the number of accounts that have domain administrator rights. In addition, it will make a difference to make sure that no accounts have weak passwords and that none of the accounts share the same passwords with other accounts or systems.

Implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) is one of the easiest and least expensive measures you can take to protect against ransomware and other attacks. We can show you the options for configuring MFA and how to complement it with other authentication and access control solutions.

Criminals launching ransomware or other attacks may be able to exploit gaps in your network to get administrator-level access to your systems. Depending on their proficiency, attackers can reach your digital assets even if you keep systems protected and current with patches and data protection software. Sikich penetration testing highlights gaps that could compromise your systems, and our experts can help you close the gaps and strengthen your security measures.

Many successful ransomware attacks bypass or disable anti-virus software, which is typically not equipped to prevent that kind of intrusion. You can continue to rely on your anti-virus tools to detect and remove many common viruses and other malware from your systems, but you may want to augment your security with a strong ransomware defense. The Sikich MSSP arsenal includes solutions and services that can be invaluable in this regard, including endpoint detection and response technology for immediate discovery and mitigation of ransomware and other serious threats.

The default configuration for many organizational systems does not enable logging with enough detail and traceability to investigate and understand how a ransomware attack succeeded. This makes it more difficult to assess your vulnerabilities and strengthen your security. Your Sikich cybersecurity consultants can reconfigure logging to be more helpful. They also can set up round-the-clock monitoring coverage for system logs and shelter them in a centralized location with additional security measures.