You can’t guarantee that a ransomware attack will never impact your business. The good news is that you can take steps to minimize your organization’s risk of becoming the victim of a successful ransomware attack.
In 2023 alone, nearly three-quarters of businesses were affected by ransomware, reflecting just how widespread ransomware incidents have become.
To help businesses prevent ransomware from damaging their finances and reputations, we’ve prepared the following ransomware prevention checklist, highlighting 10 key steps you can take starting today to protect your organization against ransomware. These include procedures that help to prevent threat actors from launching ransomware attacks against your company in the first place, as well as techniques that, in the event that you are attacked, maximize your ability to recover without paying a ransom.
Phishing is a type of attack in which threat actors trick employees into handing over sensitive information, like passwords, that they can then use to access systems and deploy ransomware. Phishing accounts for 41 percent of all ransomware incidents, making it the most common attack vector.
For this reason, educating employees about the risks that phishing poses is one key step toward ransomware prevention. The more aware employees are of what phishing attempts look like, the less likely they’ll be to fall for the ruse.
Unfortunately, phishing has become more challenging for humans to detect in recent years, especially due to the use of generative AI by threat actors to conduct phishing and fraud. Because generative AI tools can produce content that is high in quality and free of grammatical errors, traditional anti-phishing techniques, like training employees to be wary of poorly written emails requesting sensitive information, don’t work as well as they once did.
For this reason, employee education campaigns should be coupled with automated phishing detection tools and strategies, such as antivirus software and email spam filters. While these solutions won’t guarantee that phishing messages will never get through, they are effective at meaningfully reducing the risk of ransomware attacks.
Unpatched software vulnerabilities are another common ransomware attack vector. Fortunately, they’re also an easy risk to mitigate. When you install software updates on a regular basis, you typically remove the vulnerabilities that threat actors could exploit to gain access to your systems and hold your data for ransom.
Regular patching doesn’t guarantee protection against all vulnerabilities that could lead to ransomware. In particular, it won’t protect against zero-day vulnerabilities, meaning ones for which patches do not yet exist. But it does mitigate most vulnerabilities, dramatically reducing your organization’s susceptibility to ransomware attacks.
Now that we’ve discussed techniques that can help prevent threat actors from deploying ransomware, let’s move to the next part of your ransomware prevention checklist: strategies for mitigating the fallout of a ransomware attack if one does occur.
The first critical step in this vein is to start backing up your data on a periodic basis. To prevent successful ransomware attacks, you must back up data regularly and systematically. That way, if attackers manage to encrypt your data, you’ll have recent backups available that you can use to restore your systems without paying the ransom.
Data backups are one step toward ransomware protection. But to ensure you can recover quickly and effectively using backups, it’s critical to create a disaster recovery plan, meaning the set of steps or procedures you’ll perform to recover your data in the event of an incident like ransomware.
In addition, you should test your recovery plan regularly to validate that your team is actually able to complete the steps. You don’t want to wait until someone has taken your data for ransom to discover flaws in your recovery planning.
Backups are useless as a ransomware prevention solution if the attackers manage to delete or encrypt your backup data in addition to encrypting your production data assets. And yet, research shows that in 75 percent of ransomware attacks, backups were at least partially compromised.
To mitigate this risk, create immutable backups. Immutable backups are backup data that can’t be modified or deleted. So, even if attackers manage to locate your backups, they won’t be able to destroy them and prevent you from using them for recovery.
Off-site backup storage is another way to maximize your chances of a successful recovery in the event of a ransomware attack. Offsite backups, which are a key component of the 3-2-1 backup strategy, mean backups that are stored at a different physical site from your production systems, such as a different cloud or data center.
While housing backups off-site may increase backup storage costs and slightly complicate your backup strategy, they’re well worth it if they prevent a successful ransomware attack against your business.
Multi-cloud backup, or the practice of leveraging multiple clouds to host backup data, is another effective way of reducing the risk of having to pay a ransom in the event of a ransomware incident. With multi-cloud backups, your data remains safe even if attackers manage to compromise an entire cloud platform.
The more flexible your backup and recovery strategy is, the better positioned you’ll be to recover from a ransomware attack quickly.
For example, consider file-level data recovery. While most backups involve copies of an entire file system or disk, file-level recovery features give you the option of restoring just certain files rather than having to restore based on an entire backup.
This flexibility can be advantageous in scenarios where ransomware attackers encrypt only some of your data, in which case having to restore based on the complete backup may be less desirable than restoring individual files. Flexible recovery options are also beneficial in the event that your backups include malware, and you need to avoid reintroducing the infected data to your systems during recovery.
The faster you can transfer data, the more rapidly you’ll be able to recover from ransomware. For this reason, if you plan to use the network for recovery, it’s worth investing in high-performance networking infrastructure. Alternatively, if you have too much data to be able to move it across the network quickly enough for recovery purposes, ensure that you have the ability to transport your data on physical disks to wherever it needs to go during recovery.
No single practice can guarantee that your business won’t fall victim to ransomware. But when you follow the comprehensive ransomware prevention checklist presented above, you minimize your risk of allowing attackers to deploy ransomware on your systems in the first place while maximizing your chances of being able to recover from an attack without having to pay a ransom.