Today’s enterprise infrastructures are sophisticated, complex, and very attractive to cybercriminals. As organizations get more security-savvy to address the increased threats, bad actors are responding with more creative, more destructive, and more expensive ransomware attacks.
How Ransomware Tactics Are Changing
Ransomware has evolved over the years from rudimentary inconveniences affecting individual users to debilitating threats capable of bringing huge corporations and entire city operations to a screeching halt.
Cybercrime adapts to the times, and ransomware attacks have changed to take advantage of our data-driven economy and new ways of working to more efficiently infiltrate company networks and hit them where it hurts. These days, ransomware attackers don’t just encrypt company data and hold it for ransom. Some new strains, such as Maze, inflict “double extortion,” which means your data is encrypted and the attacker threatens to expose highly sensitive data to the public.
The current pandemic has spawned new malware tactics. Some use COVID-19 themes to trick users into clicking bad links or opening malicious attachments, while others take advantage of the increased number of people working from home outside of the company firewall to breach the security perimeter and create chaos.
Cybercriminals have also created more sophisticated delivery mechanisms that are hard to detect because they mimic real application files and often come packaged with genuine software. For example, OSX.EvilQuest is a Mac ransomware that has been found posing as an installer for the Little Snitch host-base application firewall as well as in popular DJ software Mixed In Key 8.
What the Modern IT Infrastructure Looks Like
In theory, traditional, on-premises IT infrastructures are easier to secure physically. However, they lack the flexibility and scalability modern enterprises need to function efficiently.
With the huge amount of data many organizations have to manage, on-site storage and backups are no longer economically feasible. Today, companies of almost every size are running their systems on a mix of infrastructures, including on-premises, public and private cloud, hybrid, and virtual.
This variety of infrastructures supports everything from servers and routers to software and end points, creating a mind-boggling level of complexity for your IT security team. Every different system on every different platform potentially has its own vendor support and management interface, all of which introduce security vulnerabilities and challenges for ransomware protection. IT must also contend with network enablement, internet connectivity, and network security across all of these infrastructures, as well as manage secure remote access for employees and third-party vendors.
And don’t forget about software. No longer constrained to word processing and spreadsheets, today’s enterprises have software for almost every business function. We have tools for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, productivity, and collaboration. More than likely, these applications are supported and delivered in multiple ways, including physical/on-premises, hosted, and SaaS.
Just this high-level look at the complex environments IT team members juggle daily illustrates the challenges they face in securing the organization’s systems and data against cyberthreats like ransomware.
Fortunately, ransomware protection technology is adapting quickly to address and neutralize the new and existing threats today’s enterprises face.
How Ransomware Protection Has Adapted to Secure the Modern Infrastructure
Data drives business in practically every industry, which necessitates a two-part enterprise security strategy. To effectively mitigate risks from internal and external vulnerabilities, your ransomware protection solution must integrate cybersecurity and data protection. Addressing one but not the other is a recipe for disaster, which is why Arcserve and Sophos combined their decades of data protection and cybersecurity expertise to create a comprehensive advanced ransomware protection solution designed to protect, secure, and future-proof your organization against both known and unknown threats and data loss.
Research shows that nearly 60 percent of consumers are unlikely to do business with an organization that has experienced a cyberattack in the past year. With malicious threats increasing globally, it’s crucial to implement an integrated ransomware and malware prevention solution with backup and disaster recovery capabilities that will scale and adapt to meet your unique needs.
Ransomware Prevention
Proactively addressing cyber and data security is the key component of advanced ransomware protection. A cobbled-together ransomware protection plan won’t stop today’s cybercriminals. You need an integrated, streamlined strategy with high visibility and sophisticated threat detection and prevention.
Arcserve’s ransomware prevention solutions go head to head with cyberthreats using the latest cybersecurity and data loss prevention technology, including:
- Sophos Intercept-X Advanced for Server
- A deep learning neural network to protect against unknown malware
- Signature-based protection from known threats
- Exploit prevention for common hacking methods like credential harvesting, lateral movement, and privilege escalation
- CryptoGuard to stop ransomware attacks on backup data
- WipeGuard to prevent master boot record attacks
Secure Backups
The middle of a crisis is the worst time to discover your system backup and disaster recovery are essentially useless. Arcserve’s secure backup technology provides agentless and agent-based backup and disaster recovery for on-premise and cloud-based servers.
Arcserve also supports backup and recovery for Microsoft Office 365, which is essential for securing data given Microsoft’s shared responsibility model.
Scale On Demand
One big takeaway from 2020 is that we need to be ready to adapt to anything, no matter how unlikely it seems. Arcserve’s ransomware prevention solutions help you prepare for the unknown with products that provide flexible configuration, are easily expandable, and scale up and out to the cloud with fully integrated hybrid cloud services.
Modern enterprise infrastructures are highly complex and discrete, which make them more vulnerable to cyberattacks, like ransomware. New ransomware tactics are harder to detect and can result not only in data loss but also in data exposure, which comes with its own repercussions.
A comprehensive, integrated ransomware prevention strategy is key to proactively addressing these threats. Find out how prepared your organization is to combat ransomware with Arcserve’s Ransomware Readiness Assessment.
