Taking a proactive approach to ransomware can save your organization.
Ransomware is a rising threat to modern businesses that requires a preventative ransomware solution to effectively stop the problem. But how does an attack occur, exactly?
Say a user clicks on a malicious link or downloads an infected file from their email. Suddenly, all of the files on their computer become encrypted and completely unusable. Then their desktop turns into a giant window, prompting that user to wire money to the bank account or cryptocurrency wallet address listed.
That’s it – your organization has just been hit with ransomware. Should this ransomware be the kind that enumerates other systems on the network and spreads itself, your entire organization could come to a grinding halt. Furthermore, once the criminals have your data, they can extort your organization for more money after the fact or listlessly dump it in an online archive on the deep web.
This scenario happens all too frequently in real life. In fact, the HIPAA Journal reported that in 2020, ransomware attacks collectively cost United States healthcare organizations $21 billion. The University of Vermont Health Network alone was paying approximately $1.5 million per day while trying to recover from an attack.
Indeed, the costs associated with the lasting effects of a successful attack can be detrimental. Rather than deal with the aftermath, taking a proactive approach can save your organization.
How criminals deliver ransomware
Ransomware can hit your organization in a myriad of ways. Here are a few examples:
- Users can click on links from phishing emails or compromised messaging services.
- Pop-ups can alert users of a “crucial system update” that actually contains ransomware.
- A curious employee may find a strategically placed USB drive in the parking lot with “Payroll 2020” printed on it and insert it into the system.
These vectors of attack have prompted organizations to adopt strategies to mitigate the impacts of ransomware. But even then attacks can come through, leaving businesses with a tough call to make regarding ransoms and data leakage.
After an attack hits
Ransomware continues to impact organizations and leave them in quite a difficult situation.
On the one hand, an organization can pay the ransom in hopes that the attackers surrender the decryption key to regain access to the organization’s mission-critical data. (However, there is no guarantee that the scammers won’t actually keep the key and demand even more money.)
On the other hand, some organizations are unable to pay the ransom and defer to their backup and recovery strategy. Unfortunately, untested backups or a lapse in the process can leave these organizations stranded, which can shut a company down in a matter of days.
Neither of these options is ideal, hence the importance of prevention strategies. However, many common strategies are not enough.
Conventional strategy flaws
User training that teaches employees how to spot suspicious emails, links and files is typically the primary strategy that most organizations favor. The bad news: It’s the users’ job to click on things all day, so this countermeasure to thwart ransomware only goes so far.
Even security-minded, vigilant personnel are susceptible to phishing attacks when they are distracted or acting quickly to meet a deadline. Plus, scammers are getting smarter, so phishing emails are continuously looking more legitimate.
Should ransomware manage to be introduced to your infrastructure, the incident response team will activate your disaster recovery plan to get things up and running again (in a perfect world, anyway). However, backups can be corrupted or incomplete, which means that the failsafe ransomware solution is of no help.
Thus, training, backup plans and other best practices are important, but they cannot be the only measures.
The answer: Fraud.net’s Email AI
Our advanced protection against business email compromise (BEC) stops ransomware before it becomes a problem.
With Email AI, your personnel can quickly validate inbound communications from a list of trusted contacts. This makes it much easier to expose fraudulent emails, whether it be a suspicious sender or phony vendors, all with one click.
Accelerate decision-making
Your organization’s accounting, human resources and financial services departments are extremely lucrative targets for ransomware.
To help protect these valued assets, the Email AI ransomware solution leverages machine learning with customizable rules. Alerts and scores can be populated instantly based on any of these rules so that you can accelerate the decision-making process and provide accurate insight into a potential ransomware payload attached to a seemingly legitimate email.
This drastically reduces the point of failure represented by human error, whether it’s a lapse in guesswork or a genuine mistake when clicking on an email attachment.
Protecting your organization from fraud
Fraud.net operates the largest anti-fraud consortium for enterprises across all major industries:
- Financial services
- Government
- Health
- Manufacturing
- Retail
- Technology
Through the global collaboration of big data via our collective intelligence network, we empower customers to detect and prevent ransomware attacks before their organization ends up paying out over a single mistake. Our enterprise-ready, cloud-based platform as a service puts intelligent scoring and email fingerprinting on the first page of your defensive playbook.
Plus, our Email AI is a downloadable tool through Microsoft’s AppSource marketplace. This enables visibility and high-quality prevention for up to 100 users.
Take a stand with a proven ransomware solution
Ready to win the fight against scammers with the most powerful ransomware solution for continuous, adaptive detection? Set up a demo today to learn more about Email AI.