It might have passed by quietly this year, but May 12th 2021 was Anti-Ransomware Day, a holiday created in 2020 to draw attention to the threat posed by ransomware attack. For years, ransomware prevention and defense was the singular problem of IT and network security professionals in big corporations. Now ransomware is taking the world stage. The impact of massive pay-outs to ransomware operators from enterprises without adequate threat detection and response capabilities, has begun trickling down to users, preying on consumer wallets and emotions. Rising prices to offset the cost of ransomware insurance or a major ransomware pay-out are irritating, but the fear and stress caused by anticipating a ransomware attack, or knowing your personal information has been sold to the highest bidder on the dark web, makes ransomware a pervasive issue. How do enterprises de-stress customers who are worried about ransomware issues, threats and countermeasures? Let’s discuss how threat continuous threat detection and response can take your network security from zero, to hero.
The Need for Ransomware Protection
How pervasive is ransomware? Did you know that there are more than 4,000 ransomware attacks daily? Or that the average corporate ransom pay-out is $233,217. Most businesses suffer 19 days of downtime after a ransomware attack, and as we’ve seen with Garmin and Colonial Oil, even companies who come back online quickly lose billions of dollars and customers with every attack.
This year, ransomware attacks on businesses are predicted to occur every 11 seconds, and the global cost for ransomware recovery will be over $20 billion USD. There are many situations where corporations find that ransomware has been dormant in their system for months or even years before launching an attack. How fast is a ransomware attack? WannaCry infected 200,000 computers in 150 countries in only 4 days. We will never be free from the threat of ransomware. What are the next steps CIO’s are taking toward powerful and intelligent ransomware prevention solutions?
What is Continuous Threat Detection?
Continuous threat detection is continuous monitoring for malicious activity and unauthorized internal behaviour to protect your network and users. Speed is vital when it comes to threat detection, as malicious programs must be stopped and removed before they have time to access any valuable data. Enterprises can often respond quickly to ‘known’ threats that they have seen before, but detecting and responding to “unknown” or new threats is difficult and time consuming – and often beyond the skills of IT administrators without a specialization in network security. In addition, both known and unknown threats know no office hours, with many attacks originating from nation states in different times zones, making the “continuous” part of continuous threat detection the most critical part. Ultimately, continuous threat detection and response requires automation, and automation means deploying the right solution from the right vendor.
What is Threat Detection & Response?
We know continuous threat detection is continuous threat discovery and tracking, but how important is response when you have detected a known or unknown threat? As you might have guessed, it’s vital. The most important element of threat detection and response is the automatic identification and response, in real-time, without the need for an administrator. The best solutions combine intelligence from firewalls, endpoint protection solutions and anti-virus to get visibility into every part of the network, and thus every part of a threat or attack. This kind of sophisticated analytics are important to detecting patterns and behaviour anomalies which could indicate a virus, ransomware or malware threat.
Empower your Security Team to Prevent Ransomware Attack
Your security team needs powerful features on their dashboards to help them monitor network security. Threat detection and response solutions give administrators the option of setting up automatic alerts, allowing the security team to:
- Validate threats
- Eliminate false positives
- Browse recorded data
- Analyse & respond
- Banning malicious files
- Stopping malicious processes
- Quarantining affected machines
- Continuous monitoring
- Forensic analysis
Mitigating Risk with Ransomware Prevention
There are many best practices which can take your threat detection and response capabilities to their capacity.
- Deploy a solution which allows you to log all network access endpoints
- Make use of automation to monitor and alert security teams of risky activity, and free up your IT team for more productive tasks when there are no attacks to mitigate
- Deploy a solution with real-time protection
- Deploy solutions to fortify your data, provide threat intelligence and machine learning, and encryption
- Watch for insider threat and educate employees on security best practices
- Create and educate your employees on an incident response plan, and automate human response while you automate threat detection and response
Sangfor Threat Detection & Response
Sangfor Technologies provides just the threat detection and response solution enterprises need to automate and fortify their ransomware prevention and defence capabilities. Sangfor combines AI-powered dynamic behaviour modelling, abnormal user behaviour, and Neural-X threat intelligence, in addition to providing complete (North-South, East-West) network coverage for every gateway and endpoint. Finally, Sangfor’s threat detection and response solution has superior detection capabilities, easily drawing on global threat intelligence and malware detection of Engine Zero, to detect everything from known and unknown threats, to insider threat and abnormal behaviour.
Sangfor Technologies is an APAC-based, global leading vendor of IT infrastructure solutions specializing in Network Security and Cloud Computing. Visit us at www.sangfor.com to learn more about Sangfor’s Security solutions and ransomware protection, and let Sangfor make your IT simpler, more secure and valuable.
