There is a wide range of risks that businesses face each and every day. However, while shifting markets and increased competition are always a point of concern, ransomware attacks and other forms of cybercrime have quickly become a priority.
While ransomware attacks are damaging enough on their own, each year they become even more sophisticated, increasing both the frequency with which they’re deployed and their severity to growing businesses.
Because of the significant impact of falling victim to a ransomware attack, it’s essential for businesses to implement the necessary defenses that help create more resilient operations.
Secure Network Endpoint Protocols
When you’re operating a business, especially one with hybrid or remote working employees, it’s critical to ensure you are securing all potential endpoints in your business networks. This can include company-issued laptops, personal smartphones, and home computers.
Depending on the size of your organization, you could have hundreds of different network connections that need to be adequately vetted and secured. Failure to do this could lead to vulnerabilities being exploited by malicious individuals, allowing them to access your networks freely.
But you can’t protect what you don’t know about. This is where Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions can come into play. These tools enable your IT teams to more easily monitor networks, identifying and tracking the activities of each device. This can help limit access to sensitive databases and provide comprehensive visibility into your network’s activity.
It’s also important to document various policies and procedures for employees regarding the use of their personal devices to access company assets. This can include avoiding the use of public Wi-Fi connections when connecting to business networks, locking their devices when not in use, and ensuring their operating systems are regularly updated with the latest security patches.
Strong Password and Authentication Policies
When focusing on improving cybersecurity measures across your organization, your employees should be considered one of your most important lines of defense. Unfortunately, bad password habits or a simple lack of awareness surrounding cyber risks can leave employees prime targets for criminals.
While no one wants to have to struggle to remember their login credentials every time they log into a new application or service, having easy-to-remember passwords comes at the expense of increased security. This is why it’s important for your business to enforce a set of security best practices that everyone follows when establishing their usernames and passwords.
Some practical steps you can follow in this area include:
- Prioritize Length Over Complexity – Password length is the most important element of its overall strength. In the past, using multiple numbers and special characters was suggested as the best method for protecting login credentials. However, a length of at least 12 characters is considered the most important element.
- Make Use of Password Managers – Using secure password managers can help employees use different credentials for each platform they access. They also make it easy to generate, store, and auto-fill passwords whenever needed.
- Leverage Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) – Enabling MFA features in various applications and cloud services significantly increases the difficulty for unauthorized individuals to gain access to business systems, even if standard credentials have been compromised.
- Lock Accounts After Failed Attempts – Enable security features that automate account locking after a few failed login attempts. This considerably reduces the success rate of brute-force attacks.
- Eliminate Password Hints – In the past, password hints were regularly used to help individuals who forget their credentials to remember them by asking a question or mentioning a few keywords associated with the password. This is now prohibited by NIST, and these features should be removed as they provide more helpful information to hackers when trying to gain system access.
Effective Data Backup Processes
Regularly backing up your critical systems and databases is a crucial step in enhancing your chances of a successful recovery process following a ransomware attack. This ensures that even if your systems are inaccessible or your third-party vendors become compromised, you’ll still have reliable backup copies to turn to for restoring your systems to normal.
Even though it can take some time to establish your systems from backup files, it’s a much more reliable path forward than needing to rebuild from scratch, or even worse, paying a ransom amount.
When establishing data backup processes, it’s important to follow a 3-2-1 backup rule. This is a straightforward framework that minimizes the chances of one or more of your backups being unusable when you need them the most.
- Keep three separate copies of your data backups.
- Store backups in at least two different formats, such as a local server and a cloud-based service
- Make sure that at least one copy of your data is stored in a safe, off-site location.
Segmenting Your Networks
What makes ransomware so difficult to deal with is how quickly it can spread from one area to another on your network. One way to effectively limit this possibility is by segmenting your business networks.
When you segment your networks, you’re essentially creating digital walls within your various IT environments. Instead of having a large central business network, you break it up into smaller, isolated segments. This ensures that if one system gets compromised, you can contain the network breach while making it much more challenging for the attack to persist and spread to other connected areas.
Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Management
It’s essential for businesses to continuously test the integrity of their systems to look for new potential vulnerabilities in their security and address them. Even if you’ve already made significant investments in various security measures, over time, as your business evolves, their effectiveness can diminish.
However, taking the time to pinpoint security inefficiencies takes time and expertise that not all businesses may have. This is where working with penetration testing services can help.
Penetration testing services help businesses by simulating various cyberattack scenarios, allowing them to identify the most critical security weaknesses. This then allows the business to prioritize improvement that will yield the greatest benefit when trying to safeguard against ransomware threats.
Compliance Management Practices
It’s important to remember when hardening your business’s defenses that a ransomware incident can do much more than just disrupt your operations – it can also create massive legal and compliance headaches. An uncontained breach can expose you to potential financial penalties for breaching regulatory compliance standards and severely damage the reputation you’ve worked hard to build.
Given these stakes, it’s critical to ensure all of your company’s data is protected. Data encryption can be used to ensure your data is unreadable to anyone without authorized access. While this may not stop criminals from stealing the data file itself, it does make the information essentially useless to them. This means they’ll likely not be able to sell or leak the information across the dark web.
Many times, it can be a good decision to work with compliance consulting services that can help you make sense of the complex regulations in your industry and help you build a sustainable compliance management strategy moving forward.
Take the Necessary Steps to Protect Your Business
The best way to protect your business from ransomware attacks is through proactive security planning. By following the strategies discussed, you’ll make it much harder to become a successful victim of a cyber attack while ensuring your business can successfully recover in the event that you do.
Author Bio Information
Author Bio:
Nazy Fouladirad is President and COO of Tevora, a global leading cybersecurity consultancy. She has dedicated her career to creating a more secure business and online environment for organizations across the country and world. She is passionate about serving her community and acts as a board member for a local nonprofit organization.
Founder Dinis Guarda
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