Best Recovery Strategy You Should Follow After Ransomware Attack

According to recent reports, “ Ransomware attacks have doubled and now affect more than half of all businesses worldwide”.

Ransomware is a type of malware-based cyberattack. Once installed on the user’s device, the malware continues to hold corporate data hostage, either by locking users out or encrypting it, until the organization pays a ransom to have it restored.

Hackers are known to turn the tables in their favour in uncertain situations, and this period of the pandemic is offering them what they want. Organizations have had to make significant changes to their IT frameworks in order to allow employees to work from home since the beginning of the year. Due to the fast-changing atmosphere in every company, many of the firms have loopholes, and hackers easily attack those breaches.

Hackers are always on the lookout for breaches, and when they find one such opportunity, they are not going to neglect it. Let’s get started with one topic that you should be aware of in detail, and that is Ransomware. Without wasting another minute, let’s start from scratch.

What Is Ransomware And How Does It Work?

Ransomware is a type of malware that uses encryption to hold a victim’s data hostage. The critical data of a user or organization is encrypted, making it impossible for them to access files, databases, or applications. There are two types of it; crypto-ransomware and locker-ransomware.

Crypto-ransomware, as the name suggests, the data is encrypted, and the company has to pay the price to get back the decrypted data of the organization.

Locker-ransomware, the files, and data won’t be encrypted, but it will be locked. The company won’t be able to have access to its own data. The ransom is paid to get the data unlocked.

In both cases, the attacker demands payment and threatens to publish sensitive information or permanently delete data if the victim does not comply.

The Significance Of Having A Ransomware Recovery Plan

Failure to implement a ransomware recovery strategy can have serious consequences for your business. A ransomware attack can not only harm your organization’s productivity (and, to some extent, its reputation), but it can also cost you thousands of dollars. In fact, in 2019, the average ransomware payment was just over $84,000.

When a ransomware attack occurs, having a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy in place can save your company time, money, and, most importantly, data. When a ransomware attack occurs, an in-depth cybersecurity strategy embodies a holistic, multi-security response strategy that is designed to keep threats out while also empowering strong resilience to minimize downtime.

Do you want to know more about the practice for ransomware recovery? Then here is your answer.

Best Practices For Ransomware Recovery

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) suggests that you use the Cyber Security Framework (CSF) to develop your comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, which defines five key functions:

• Identify – The first thing to do is to identify the key assets.
• Protect – Automate data backup and data protection for your most important assets.
• Detect – Now, the time is to detect any malicious activity.
• Respond – Proactively respond to the threat in order to prevent them from spreading.
• Recover – Recover the data immediately from the backups that you have made earlier.

The right ransomware recovery solution is essential for ensuring that your company has a strong multi-layer defense strategy in place to mitigate the impact of ransomware or malware.

Are you curious to know about how you can recover from a ransomware attack? Then there are a few things you should keep in mind.

1) Refuse to pay the ransom

First and foremost, refuse to pay the ransom. Unless you don’t have any backups of your data, in which case the expense of data loss must be weighed against the demanded payment. This is due to a variety of reasons:

• You are dealing with a criminal, and you never know whether they will return the data once you pay the demanded amount.
• If you pay the ransom, you will be promoting their actions, and hackers will put other organizations on their target list.
• The cost of dealing with an attack is doubled if you pay the ransom. Even if you recover your data, the malware will remain on your servers, necessitating further cleaning. On top of the ransom, you’ll have to pay for downtime, people’s time, device costs, and so on.

2) Notify the authorities of the attack

You must report the attack once you’ve taken a deep breath and put your wallet away. This will aid authorities in identifying the attacker and how they select their targets and prevent other organizations from being targeted in the future.

In most cases, you can contact your local police department, which will direct you to their cybercrime investigations unit. If you’re in the United States, you can report it through the On Guard Online website; if you’re in the United Kingdom, you can report it through Action Fraud.

3) Cleanse your organization’s systems

There are some software packages on the market that claim to be able to remove Ransomware from your computer, but there are two issues with this. The first is that there’s no guarantee that anyone other than the attacker will be able to fully remove the Ransomware. The second issue is that, even if your system is clean, you may still be unable to access your data.

Tragically, there isn’t a decoding tool for every type of Ransomware, and the newer and more advanced the Ransomware, the longer it will take experts to create a tool to decrypt your files.

On the other hand, encryption entails putting a decryption key and the original file through a function together to recover the original file.

On the other hand, modern attacks use a unique key for each victim, so even a potent supercomputer could take years to find the right key for a single victim.

TeslaCrypt is a good example of this: while the original Ransomware only required a single key to decrypt the data of multiple victims, modern variants of the attack allow the criminal to use different encryption keys for each victim.

As a result, the best course of action is to wipe all of your storage devices and start over, reinstalling everything from scratch. This will ensure that there are no traces of Ransomware lurking in the shadows, and you’ll have a fresh start when it comes to restoring your data.

4) Recover your information

Data backup has long been thought of as an IT compliance issue that must be completed in order to checkboxes and pass audits. It is, however, increasingly being viewed as a security issue, and with good reason.

Hackers used advanced technology, and you might not always be able to protect your firm from such attacks, but one thing that you can do is to diminish the effect of the attack. As you have read already at the beginning of this blog, there are two types of Ransomware, and making a regular backup of your data can save you from such unexpected attacks.

Backups can be used to restore data in a few different ways.

• The first is to perform a system restore on your own. Pros: It’s relatively inexpensive and simple to complete. Cons: The data you’re trying to restore may contain malware traces, and you won’t be able to retrieve any personal files.

That means you could end up back at step one, and even if you don’t, you won’t be able to recover everything you lost. This is why, in order to use the second restoration method, third-party disaster recovery, you should always have a solid backup solution in place.

• Solutions for backup and recovery – Take a snapshot of all of your files, databases, and computers at a specific point in time and save it to a secondary storage device separate from your local computers. The benefits include guaranteed and secure recovery of all of your files, as well as external vendor support, so you don’t have to handle the recovery on your own. The only disadvantage is that the solution is not free.
• Point-in-time recovery, also known as continuous data protection or journaling, is a feature of the best backup and recovery solutions designed to aid organizations in recovering from ransomware attacks. This version-controlled method of data recovery allows businesses to recover data from as far back as seconds before the ransomware attack.

Conclusion

Now, you are well aware of the ransomware attack and how you can save your firm from such malicious attacks. So, it is time to better increase safety with help of a cyber security expert, and don’t forget to make regular backups to decrease the effect of an attack.

Choose the right cyber security consultant to offer the best services that can help you to protect your company. Don’t waste another minute and start with looking out for one such company. Keep the above-mentioned things in your mind, and you won’t leave the loopholes for the hacker to attack you.