Can Your Las Vegas Organization Recover From A Ransomware Attack?
According to expert estimates, ransomware attacks occur every 11 seconds globally, meaning that at least one company has been targeted by the time of finishing typing this statement. Frightening, huh?
The point is, no organization – large or small alike – is immune from the unforgiving cybercriminals, and an attack can happen any time. So what matters is how quickly you contain the ransomware attack and recover from it. But you’re not just going to sit back and wait for a cyber incident to happen so you can recover from it, are you?
The first and most critical step for any organization is implementing the most updated security measures and having a qualified team at your disposal to help prevent the attacks in the first place. So post-hack recovery should begin way before the attack even happens. That means partnering with a reliable managed security services provider (MSSP) to help your organization:
- Draft an incident response plan
- Implement various safety precautions
- Monitor your IT systems 24/7
Draft an Incident Response Plan
An incident response plan is a set of instructions that help IT experts detect, respond to, and recover from ransomware or any other cyber threat. Having a ready and updated plan gives a clear road map for your organization to contain an attack and recover from it as rapidly as possible. So, how do you build a company-specific incident response plan that can come in handy in the event of an attack? Here are the five steps:
1. Determine What’s at Risk
When creating a rock-solid incident response plan, the first step is conducting an all-inclusive risk assessment to determine all the vulnerable components of your network. And because business networks are pretty complex and expansive, you want to determine the most significant systems and data, prioritize their backup, and make their locations. This can help you recover your network faster should an incident occur.
2. Identify and Address Single Points of Failure in Your Network
Backing up your data isn’t enough; you want to go a notch higher to determine single points of failure in network components like staff roles, hardware, and software. After identifying such vulnerabilities, it’s time to address them through software failover features or redundancies. The same applies to your staff; if a designated employee can’t respond to an incident, you should have a second person in line who can take over if an attack occurs, minimizing damage.
3. Create a Business/Workforce Continuity Plan
If a cyber incident or natural disaster occurs, you should prioritize employee safety and continuity of business operations even as you grapple with recovery. In short, you should minimize business downtime and revenue loss by empowering employees to work remotely. That means rolling out technologies like VPNs, virtual desktops, secure web gateways, video conferencing solutions, etc., to support workforce collaboration, communication, and access to work systems.
4. Build an Incident Response Plan
Drafting an all-inclusive incident response plan shouldn’t be challenging if you’ve reached this far. In essence, the plan should classify:
- Roles and responsibilities for everyone in the incident response team
- Communication criteria, both external and internal
- All vital network and data recovery protocols
- All tools, technologies, and resources required for a successful incident response
- A business continuity plan
5. Train Your Staff on Incident Response
It’s overly critical that everyone in the organization understands the essence of the incident response plan. That’s because rapid recovery from an attack requires full employee cooperation with the IT department to minimize the damage and disruption. In addition, the regular employee understanding basic cybersecurity concepts can help prevent an attack in the first place.
Implement Various Safety Precautions
Your organization can implement several safety precautions to avoid getting victimized by ransomware criminals or recover quickly from an attack. These include backing up your data (and testing backups), updating software, controlling access, etc.
Data Backup
Data backup is the practice of keeping a duplicate of your most critical data in a safe and separate location like the cloud. So if an attack occurs, you can effortlessly retrieve the backed-up data to avoid downtime or financial loss. But how do you ensure that the data will be easily retrievable when you need it? That’s where recovery testing your backups comes into play. You should test your backups regularly to confirm that the essential data is readily available for recovery in the event of an incident.
Update Your Software and Systems
Most ransomware attacks succeed because the criminals manage to capitalize on a security loophole in your business systems or software. The good news is that you can proactively prevent this from happening by investing in a patch management system. The solution automatically manages your software and system updates, keeping them security-tight throughout.
Control Access
Controlling who can access your systems and classified company information goes a long way in preventing ransomware attacks. That means installing a firewall, implementing multi-factor authentication, restricting data access, maintaining physical site security, monitoring system usage, among other best practices.
Monitor Your Network 24/7
It’s common knowledge; cyber threat actors strike when you least expect them to. So the best way to outsmart them is to stay alert 24/7/365, watching out for any suspicious activities within your network and IT systems.
Your IT team should have enterprise-grade monitoring software installed on all endpoint devices, allowing you to constantly keep track of your IT infrastructure’s security, performance, and reliability. But there’s more to security and network monitoring than keeping an eye on the system’s health 24/7/365. The best IT team should outperform themselves by:
- Monitoring business applications and services to unmask potential issues, regardless of whether the server is running flawlessly.
- Checking for and providing timely software updates, including antivirus software and desktop operating systems.
- Monitoring backups to ensure that data backups occur every night (or as per schedule) and investigating reasons for failure.
- Setting up automated alert systems so that the team is always the first to know if there’s a critical network issue.
- Providing detailed reports to the management regarding system performance, security patching, up-time, etc.
NSA is Your No.1 Rated Ransomware Recovery Team in Las Vegas!
NEVER pay a ransom in the event of a ransomware attack when you can practically recover from it or prevent it in the first place! The first step is to bring a reliable cybersecurity consultant on board to help you draft an air-tight incident response plan. Planning ahead of time is, without a doubt, the most critical part, as it enables you to understand how you’ll keep business operations running should the worst happen. Plus, it lays down the roadmap on how to quickly recover from an incident.
Of course, you want to combine your incident response plan with other cybersecurity best practices like data backup, active system monitoring, control access, etc., for optimal threat protection. Schedule a FREE consultation with NSA to find out how our highly competent and self-motivated cybersecurity experts can help your Las Vegas business prevent and recover from cyberattacks like ransomware.