Key Ransomware Protection Strategies

Layered Defense is Key

Calculate Your Ransomware Exposure

Calculate Your Ransomware Risk and Potential Cost Savings

Want to understand your financial risk and what you could save with effective ransomware protection? Enter your details below.

The Zero Trust Leader

Your Company

Select Your Industry:

  • Communication
  • Consumer
  • Education
  • Energy
  • Entertainment
  • Financial
  • Healthcare
  • Hospitality
  • Industrial
  • Media
  • Pharma
  • Public
  • Research
  • Retail
  • Services
  • Technology
  • Transportation

Annual Chance of Attack:

  • 1 to 500
  • 501 to 1,000
  • 1,001 to 5,000
  • 5,001 to 10,000
  • 10,001 to 25,000
  • 25,001 and above

Your Benefits

Average total cost of an attack:

  • Based on industry/employee count: $7,435,840

Average financial risk:

  • Based on chance of attack: $4,439,196

Adjusted financial risk:

  • After implementing Zscaler: $665,879

Expected Annual Cost Reduction: $3,773,317

The average chance of a data breach is 59.7% per year, according to Ponemon Institute.

Customer interviews show an average risk decrease of 85% by using Zscaler.

Case Studies

Select an industry to view specific insights.

Traditional ransomware defense focuses on detecting malicious activity after an attacker has gained access to the environment. Zscaler takes a different approach by reducing the attack surface, preventing initial compromise, limiting lateral movement, and restricting access to critical applications and data. By applying Zero Trust principles across users, devices, applications, and internet traffic, organisations can significantly reduce the likelihood and impact of ransomware attacks while improving visibility and control across their environment.

Protection against ransomware requires a multi-layered approach through defense in depth, with both preventative measures and recoverability capabilities. Due to the variety of attack methods, there is no single silver bullet that will provide comprehensive protection. As no protection is 100% effective, organizations must ensure they have recoverability capabilities in place for when they are compromised. Hararei can help organizations to implement a comprehensive approach to ransomware protection.

Preventative Measures

Preventative measures include endpoint protection, perimeter protection and patch management. Endpoint protection is typically provided by anti-virus (AV) products. Perimeter defence is provided by Internet Firewalls/Gateways. Patch Management provides effective distribution of vendor Operating System and application patches.

Perimeter Protection

The first place to protect your environment is at the perimeter. For this, Hararei offer the Zscaler cloud platform (Security–as–a–Service). Zscaler Internet Access — Sits inline between your company and the Internet, protecting your enterprise from cyberthreats, stopping intellectual property leaks, and ensuring compliance with corporate content and access policies. Zscaler security capabilities provide defence–in–depth defense, protecting you from a broad range of threats including malicious URL requests, viruses, Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), zero–day malware, adware, spyware, botnets, cross–site scripting, and much more.

Endpoint Protection

The next layer of defense is Endpoint Protection, for which Hararei offer the Arctic Wolf NextGen Anti-Virus (NGAV) product. This product is a top–rated AI–enabled product which does not require signature updates or endpoint device scanning, but uses Machine Learning (ML) techniques to identify malware. Through the use of AI, Arctic Wolf Aurora Endpoint Defense is able to protect against future virus variants which have not yet been written.

If your endpoint protection is signature–based, you have no Zero Day defense!

Patch Management

Another layer of defense is timely application of vendor and application security patches. Timeliness is key! For patch management, Hararei offer the Action/1 endpoint patching. Autonomous Endpoint Management (AEM) is a modern solution for efficiently managing and securing endpoints at scale. Harnessing automation, data analytics, and AI, AEM minimizes manual intervention, speeds up threat mitigation, simplifies maintaining security posture consistency, delivers compliance assurance and significantly boosts IT team productivity.

Recoverability

No protection can be absolutely guaranteed, so it is important to be able to recover from an attack if the worst happens. Recoverability measures help to recover from Ransomware attacks.

Offline Immutable Backups

This protection essentially involves maintaining an inaccessible, offline backup of data. Hararei believe this offline copy is best offered in the Cloud, away from your primary dataset, so therefore recommend a Managed Backup service for backups.

Recommendation

Hararei recommend that organizations begin to implement ransomware protection as soon as possible. We have seen many Ransomware attacks, and in most cases, the client was still deliberating which way to proceed. Inaction increases the likelihood of an attack. Hararei recommend commencing with a programme to protect/recover your data in the first phase, and then start to increase preventative controls over time as budget and resources permit.