What is enterprise ransomware protection?
Enterprise ransomware protection is an approach adopted by businesses to combat ransomware attacks and secure critical business data. It has become an essential strategy as ransomware actors have adopted a radical approach toward their targets. Nowadays, ransomware attacks are aimed towards mid-scale enterprises, which are less cyber-resilient, rather than highly sophisticated, cyber-prepared organizations. As these enterprises are at the forefront of digitalization and network expansion, their initial investment in cybersecurity is comparatively low, making them vulnerable to ransomware attacks. Thus, adopting a proactive ransomware protection strategy is essential for evolving medium-sized businesses. This page will help you discover proactive strategies and solutions to protect your expanding enterprise network from ransomware attacks.
Challenges in enterprise ransomware protection
Here are eight major challenges faced by expanding mid-scale enterprises in ransomware protection.
1. Network complexity
As businesses expand, they must accommodate a growing number of endpoints, network devices, servers, and file systems. With a more extensive network, the complexity also increases, creating several security gaps and misconfigurations in the network and networking devices. The prevalence of unsecured devices and network misconfigurations leads to potential vulnerabilities in the network that can be easily exploited by ransomware actors.
2. Network segmentation
Network segmentation helps contain ransomware attacks and prevent them from spreading across the network. However, implementing and managing segmentation in a dynamic network can be complex and time-consuming, leading some enterprises to neglect it. This paves the way for ransomware to propagate more easily across the network.
3. Periodic software updates
As enterprises use a diverse range of software applications and systems, regular vulnerability scans and patch updates are essential. However, without automation, managing patch updates across various systems and intervals is both time-consuming and resource-intensive. To conserve time and resources and reduce network interruptions, many businesses may neglect periodic software updates, creating unpatched vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit.
4. Data backup and recovery
Managing and storing large volumes of backup data is resource-intensive, which may be challenging for medium-sized businesses. Regular data backups are crucial for ensuring faster data recovery and minimizing downtime during a ransomware attack. However, if backups are not regularly updated and tested and stored securely, they might become corrupted or inaccessible during recovery.
5. Supply chain risks
Weak links in the supply chain can allow ransomware to easily access the enterprise network. Ensuring the safety and security of third-party tools and software is crucial to prevent such attacks. However, enforcing security policies for third-party services and scrutinizing their compliance with security standards is a challenging and ongoing process that many businesses struggle to manage effectively.
6. Scaling security solutions
As businesses expand to accommodate a growing number of devices, many security solutions have limitations on the number of devices they can support. When scaling existing security solutions becomes unfeasible, businesses often rely on multiple security tools. The use of several isolated security tools creates gaps in detection capabilities, making it easier for ransomware to evade detection.
7. Evolving ransomware kill chain
Emerging businesses often rely on traditional ransomware detection and mitigation tools in the initial phases. However, today’s ransomware strains use sophisticated techniques to compromise enterprise networks. Ransomware variants follow unique tactics in the attack kill chain and leverage legitimate tools to move laterally across the network, thereby evading detection by conventional solutions.
8. Employee training
While security teams in enterprises are aware about ransomware and its methods of attack, most employees lack sufficient understanding of ransomware and its potential impact. These less-informed users can become vulnerable points in the network, facilitating the entry of ransomware. Training a large group of employees to recognize phishing attempts, suspicious network activities, and malicious file changes is crucial but highly challenging due to limited resources and time constraints.
Enterprise ransomware protection strategy
A ransomware protection strategy helps enterprises overcome the challenges in securing their network from ransomware attacks. The strategy should comprise four major stages that can reinforce businesses from ransomware attacks and their subsequent damages.
Stage 1: Prepare
Preparing your business to tackle a ransomware attack is the first stage of the protection strategy. It involves the following steps:
- Build a dedicated security team for ransomware protection and define members' roles and responsibilities.
- Formulate predefined policies that include detection and prevention techniques, an incident response plan, and a ransom demand policy.
- Create a unified asset inventory of all network devices, applications, file servers, and databases that contain sensitive information.
- Integrate all security solutions and centralize network monitoring on a single console. This can be done by employing a SIEM tool that provides complete visibility across the network.
- Educate employees on the impact of ransomware and provide training to identify phishing emails, anomalous processes, and malicious executables.
Stage 2: Prevent
The second stage of the protection strategy is the proactive step of preventing the attack. Here are some of the best practices for ransomware prevention:
- Conduct periodic risk assessments and vulnerability scans across the network for known vulnerabilities and also to identify emergent threats.
- Carry out regular patch updates for existing devices and update default configuration settings for new devices that are added to the network.
- Ensure that security configurations in firewalls, IDSs, and IPSs are updated regularly.
- Scan and test third-party software and tools in a test environment before deploying them in your network.
- Back up files with sensitive data and ensure the safety of the original files and their backups using data encryption techniques.
- Implement MFA for all user accounts and enforce strong password policies.
Stage 3: Detect
Ransomware detection is the third stage of the protection strategy and involves various techniques to identify a ransomware attack. Some prominent techniques that can be used to identify common signs of ransomware are as follows:
- Email filtering: Phishing emails are common vectors of ransomware that carry malicious URLs, attachments, and executables. Email filtering tools flag emails with suspicious content and block them from your inbox.
- Static file analysis: This technique enables the identification of malicious executables and attachments by scanning the file contents for common ransomware IoCs and signatures.
- Traffic analysis: In this technique, all incoming and outgoing traffic in the network is analyzed, and data packets that contain sensitive information or malicious files are blocked from transmission.
- Anomaly detection: User and entity behavior monitoring tools enable the detection of anomalous activities, like unauthorized access and logons, privilege escalations, and lateral movement within the network.
- File integrity monitoring: This technique involves continuous monitoring of sensitive files, folders, and their backups to detect abnormal file executions, unauthorized accesses, sudden increases in file encryption, and excessive file renames.
Stage 4: Respond
Ransomware incident response is the final stage of the protection strategy. It's crucial to minimize the damages caused by the attack and ensure business continuity. A response plan involves the following steps:
- Identification: Determine the infected systems and isolate them from unaffected critical systems.
- Containment: Disconnect all network connections, like ethernet, Wi-Fi, and bluetooth, and disable all system maintenance operations to prevent the propagation of the attack.
- Eradication: Collect and analyze the security logs of the affected systems to identify the IoCs and IoAs involved in the attack kill chain. Verify the IoCs to identify the ransomware strain and deploy relevant mitigation strategies.
- Recovery: Determine the nature of the files and data contained in the impacted systems and procure relevant decryption tools to retrieve the encrypted data.
- Report: Report the incident to cyber authorities to obtain technical support during eradication and mitigation of the attack. Disclose the incident to all stakeholders and the public to prevent reputational backlashes.
Enterprise ransomware protection solution: ManageEngine Log360
ManageEngine Log360 is a comprehensive SIEM solution with advanced file integrity monitoring and data loss prevention capabilities. Log360 stands out as one of the best enterprise ransomware protection solutions, offering the following features:
- Agent-based and agentless log collection: Log360 supports both agent-based and agentless log collection. The agent-based approach allows the solution to scale to accommodate all network devices, applications, file servers, and cloud sources for centralized security monitoring.
- 360-degree network visibility: Log360 provides complete visibility into the network through out-of-the-box audit reports and interactive dashboards on a single console.
- Ransomware detection: Predefined correlation rules and alert profiles for ransomware detection help identify potential ransomware activities in real time.
- Ransomware incident response: Log360's ransomware detection alert profiles include built-in incident response workflows that, when enabled, prevent the propagation of ransomware attacks.
- User and entity behavior analytics: With its ML-based behavior monitoring capabilities, Log360 detects anomalous activities in the network to identify potential signs of a ransomware attack.
- File monitoring: Log360's file integrity monitoring helps monitor unauthorized file accesses, creations, deletions, and modifications to protect sensitive data from ransomware threats.
To learn more about our unified ransomware protection tool, you can either sign up for a personalized demo or download a fully functional, 30-day, free trial of Log360.
