Throughout this blog series, we have shared essential best practices that we believe are crucial in safeguarding your organization against ransomware attacks. By utilizing backups, protecting endpoints, securing and monitoring VPNs, monitoring and protecting your network, and implementing multifactor authentication (MFA), you can effectively defend your organization.
While these steps are highly effective, it’s important to keep in mind that cyber attackers are constantly innovating and modifying their tactics. Therefore, it is crucial to prioritize testing, practicing, updating, and improving at every stage. Adopting continuous improvement best practices is key to protecting your organization against ransomware threats.
Here are four best practices for Continuous Improvement:
- Research and Education: Learn and stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape and adapt defenses accordingly. Monitor emerging ransomware trends, learn from new attack techniques, and update security measures to address the latest vulnerabilities. Read the latest ransomware news, share intelligence with your peers, and attend virtual and local conferences and events like the Information Security Forum (ISF) and Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs) where members openly share attack, defense and threat intelligence.
- Proactive Vulnerability Management: Know the risks and vulnerabilities in your systems and networks. Regularly identify and remediate security flaws, control failures, and system vulnerabilities. Update software and systems, and conduct security assessments and penetration testing monthly. Vulnerability management should probably be its own section, and companies like our partner Syxsense offer effective solutions. You can reduce your threat surface risk by continuously improving your security posture.
- Incident Response and Recovery Planning: Continuous improvement involves enhancing incident response and recovery planning because systems, organizations and people change. Regularly review and update your incident response plans to address the changing ransomware landscape. This includes defining roles and responsibilities, establishing communication protocols, conducting simulated response scenarios, and reviewing and testing backup systems.
- Ransomware Defensive Program: Set program goals and measure effectiveness. Work toward continuous improvement in control and response effectiveness. Determine multi-layered defense effectiveness and measure the operational success of your firewalls, network defense, endpoint protection, and other tools. Roll these metrics into executive reports to show the effectiveness and success of your ransomware defense program to lines of business and executives.
Next week’s blog will discuss Cyber Insurance. Over the past few years, the process of obtaining cyber insurance has evolved from a straightforward and cost-effective method of mitigating the risk of ransomware attacks to a complex and time-consuming affair that can prove to be quite expensive. Stay tuned for critical steps to keep in mind when considering Cyber Insurance.
To learn more, reach out to CyGlass:
www.cyglass.com/solutions-ransomware-defense
Bill Munroe
VP of Marketing, CyGlass
