Three ways to protect yourself from ransomware

Getting yourself ransomware protection requires more than just setting up detection measures. Ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly devastating and sophisticated, making it crucial for IT security teams and security operations centres (SOC) to adopt effective defence strategies. Here are three best practices for ransomware protection:

1. Prepare to defend and recover

Businesses should implement a Zero Trust approach that assumes a breach and focuses on data recovery, backup, and secure access. In a Zero Trust environment, every access request should be fully authenticated, authorised, and encrypted. This will verify access explicitly based on various factors such as user, device, location, service, data, and network. It’s also recommended to limit user access using the principle of least privilege, providing users only with the necessary access required to complete a task within a specific timeframe. By embracing a security culture that assumes cyber attacks are actively occurring you will be able to constantly monitor your environment to protect against real-time threats.

2. Protect identities from compromise

Businesses should implement a Zero Trust approach that assumes a breach and focuses on data recovery, backup, and secure access. In a Zero Trust environment, every access request should be fully authenticated, authorised, and encrypted. This will verify access explicitly based on various factors such as user, device, location, service, data, and network. It’s also recommended to limit user access using the principle of least privilege, providing users only with the necessary access required to complete a task within a specific timeframe. By embracing a security culture that assumes cyber attacks are actively occurring you will be able to constantly monitor your environment to protect against real-time threat.

3. Prevent, detect, and respond to threats

Leveraging comprehensive prevention, detection, and response capabilities will help your business defend against threats across all workloads. By using integrated security information and event management (SIEM) and extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities you can safeguard your business, shielding against common attack vectors such as remote access, email and collaboration, endpoints, and compromised accounts. It’s important to maintain software updates, enforce user and device validation, implement advanced email security, block known threats, enforce strong multi-factor authentication and constantly monitor your environment for security-related events.