Why Resilience is Key to Ransomware Attack Recovery
Date:
January 25, 2024
Ransomware attacks continue to pose significant financial threats to businesses of all sizes. The immediate costs are clear, but there are often additional financial implications that are not immediately apparent.
One variable that is hard to pin down are losses from system downtime and disruption to business operations. When ransomware strikes, the response effectiveness can significantly impact an organization’s ability to recover.
Estimates vary, but on average it takes several weeks to months for an organization to recover from a ransomware attack, which can represent an existential risk to medium and smaller companies. This is why resilience planning is so critical.
Why is Resilience Essential
Resilience in security refers to the ability of a system or organization to withstand and recover from security incidents without major disruptions to operations.
It involves implementing measures to prevent, detect and respond to security threats, as well as having contingency plans and redundancy in place to minimize the impact of any incidents that do occur.
Resilience is becoming increasingly important in today's threat landscape, where cyberattacks are becoming more frequent and sophisticated. Organizations need to be able to quickly identify and respond to security incidents to minimize the damage and maintain business continuity.
Security solutions are designed to reduce risk, but they can't eliminate it. Resilience planning is planning for failure and having the confidence that the organization is ready to respond to a successful cyberattack or other major disruption.
Security is a process, not a static state of being. The fact is a determined attacker with enough time and resources is going to be successful in penetrating a target 1000% of the time.
Prevention capabilities are always where we will realize the greatest benefits from security efforts, but given prevention is obviously not the solution to increasingly complex ransomware operations, organizations need to focus on resilience as well.
The overarching strategy for any organization is to assure they can not only detect and disrupt ransomware attacks in progress at the earliest stages, but also be prepared for the worst-case scenarios where defenses failed, and attackers have compromised the network.
This approach emphasizes assuring critical business operations can be restored rapidly in the event of a successful ransomware attack while denying threat actors' attempts to exfiltrate sensitive data that can be leveraged to force a ransom payment even if the organization is able to recover encrypted systems without the attackers providing a decryption key.
Resilience is about planning for business continuity on the face of an extremely disruptive attack, assuring all stakeholders are prepared to act swiftly, and reducing potential losses as well as any regulatory and legal liability the organization may face in the event of a successful attack.
Key components of resilience in security include:
- Redundancy: Having backup systems and processes in place to ensure that critical functions can continue even if one system fails.
- Continuous Monitoring: Constantly monitoring systems and networks for signs of security threats or anomalies.
- Incident Response Planning: Having a plan in place for how to respond to security incidents, including who is responsible for what actions and how communication will be handled.
- Resilience Testing and Training: Regularly testing systems and processes to ensure that they are effective and providing training to employees on how to respond to security incidents.
Prevention vs. Resilience
Having a mature security program built on a foundation of robust prevention solution is essential, but it should not be confused with having a sound resilience plan in place.
The approach should assume that all security controls in the stack have failed, that the attackers have unfettered access to the network and have likely been in the systems for some period of time, that sensitive data has been compromised and most likely exfiltrated, and that business operations have been partially or completely disrupted.
A viable resilience strategy should be a standalone effort independent of any prevention measures. Preparing a resilience plan should be a little terrifying, and if it's not it is likely because the planners are trying to hedge on the potential impact to the organization instead of truly addressing the direst possibilities that could arise when victimized by attackers - especially when preparing for ransomware attacks.
Developing a Resilience Plan
Organizations require both a robust prevention and an agile resilience strategy to defend against the impending wave of ransomware attacks. Organizations of every size need to implement a strong prevention and resilience strategy to defend against ransomware attacks, including:
- Keeping all software and operating systems up to date and patched
- Assuring critical data is backed up offsite and protected from corruption in the case of a ransomware attack
- Assure all endpoints are protected with an EPP solution like next-generation anti-virus (NGAV) software and an anti-ransomware solution
- Implement network segmentation and Zero Trust policies
- Implement an employee awareness program to educate against risky behaviors, phishing techniques, etc.
- Plan and prepare for failure by running regular tabletop exercises and ensuring all stakeholders are ready and available to respond to an attack at all time
Overall, resilience in security is about being prepared for the worst while hoping for the best. By implementing measures to prevent, detect and respond to security threats, organizations can minimize the impact of any incidents that do occur and maintain the trust of their customers and stakeholders.
Halcyon.ai is the leading anti-ransomware company that closes endpoint protection gaps and defeats ransomware through built-in bypass and evasion protection, key material capture, automated decryption, and data exfiltration prevention – talk to a Halcyon expert today to find out more. Halcyon also publishes a quarterly RaaS and extortion group reference guide, Power Rankings: Ransomware Malicious Quartile.
