How to Avoid Ransomware Attacks

• Feb 11, 2023,
• TG8 Security

Ransomware attacks have been on the rise in the past decade. They can cause immense damage to your network and crumble your organization’s reputation. It is necessary to take as much precaution as possible to avoid such threatening attacks. We can never protect ourselves fully from attacks, but we can nullify the chances by exercising certain safety actions.

Practice Cyber Hygiene:

Cyber Hygiene are references to certain practices that maintain the longevity and health of systems. As you maintain your own health with personal hygiene practices, cyber hygiene practices protect your organization’s assets and network. These practices include: document all current equipment, analyze the list of equipment and programs, provide onboard employees with in-depth cybersecurity awareness training, update and patch servers regularly, control user permissions and perform data backups routinely.

These are just some basic practices for cyber hygiene. Keeping your systems and network organized and “clean” allows for administrators to respond quickest to breaches. Having a more well-defined employee policy structure for your network also removes the possibility of privilege abuse, which is one of the various ways ransomware attacks can be injected into your network.

Network Segmentation:

A counter measure to the spread of ransomware is network segmentation. Having the correct topology in your network limits the malware’s reach in your network. Most ransomware variants utilize a worm like method to spread its code amongst devices. Segmenting the network correctly gives network administrators the ability to quarantine and respond to infected devices. It also, if done correctly, stops the malicious code from reaching sensitive data in the first place.

Security Polices & Awareness:

The best procedure for solving an issue is avoiding it in the first place. Providing regular security training decreases the risk of users surfing malicious sites. This can range from identifying safe and unsafe websites to informing employees about certain breaches, viruses, etc.…

Practicing careful security policies will also decrease the number of vectors an attacker could utilize. An example would be limiting the database network to only organizational devices that never leave the premise.

Secure Web Gateway:

According to many security analysts, the internet is one of the easiest links for cybercriminals to pass their malicious codes onto your IT infrastructure when your users surf the internet. It’s becoming rather a necessity to protect your organization from such malicious codes and control internet access by deploying Secure Web Gateway (SWG).

Advanced SWGs use revolutionary technologies to scan HTTPS contents that may contain malicious codes. Since much of ransomware can be injected into the network through drive-by infection, it is vital to have proper safeguarding against these attacks. Website pop ups, phishing sites and compromised legitimate websites can be sources of ransomware attacks.

Email Security:

Another vector of attacks cyber criminals utilize is through emails. To properly secure your network from all angles, emails must be properly and thoroughly scanned. Type of attacks that ransomware attacks surface through are: phishing emails, embedded email malicious, whaling, email attachments.

With the diverse number of attacks that can be initiated with emails, a proper and sophisticated email security gateway should be deployed onto your organization.

Network Security:

Targeted attacks from a network point of view are still quite common. As days go on, more advanced attacks get created to abuse systems’ vulnerabilities. Since many attacks are injected deep into the packet payload, most malwares can pass through typical network security. DPI Firewall security targets that issue by having the technical know how to scan a packet thoroughly. Working with conjunction of placed security rules and IPSs, DPI firewalls can catch hidden malicious codes within packets.

Having a dedicated VPN link for your business increases the difficulty for attackers to harvest sensitive information from your data transfers.

Sandboxing and Threat Intelligence:

In order to combat zero-day attacks, a proper sandboxing framework could be implemented to catch signatureless ransomware. Sandboxing technology runs files on a network segment to simulate regular security processes. This causes any recently created ransomware to be detected and stopped.

Considering threat intelligence feeds will keep your network up to date about malicious sites and malware. Threat intelligence analyze different behaviors and processes to gather information about certain sites and applications.

Endpoint Security:

Endpoint security resides within the PC itself, acting as a last line of defense against malware. Endpoint security applies a variety of security techniques that include: machine learning, behavior analysis and malware signatures to shield endpoint operations. As new malwares are created daily, it is a must to update your endpoint security to the latest patch.

It’s a common mistake to assume that a top-of-the-line network security does not justify investing in good endpoint security. This is not the case, as many attacks don’t go through the firewall to begin with. For example, if your coworker tries to initiate an attack peer to peer, the traffic wont travel through cybersecurity gateways. This is where endpoint security comes into play.

Web Application Firewall:

Ransomware can be injected into your web Applications through 10 OWASP attacks and compromise them. WAF can protect such web-based applications from cyber criminals by filtering, monitoring, and blocking malicious HTTPS’ traffic traveling into your application. This is done by applying a set of security controls that help recognize malicious from not malicious traffic.

TG8 provides powerful gateway engines and seamlessly integrates with other security vendors to give your organization the proper security framework against ransomware attacks.