Cybercrime is now a global and sophisticated business. Protecting the devices and users connecting to your network is of growing importance. The attack surface of your network will continue to increase as the demand for enterprise mobility, cloud services, the Internet of Everything (IoE), and the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to rise.

What if you could stay safer from advanced cyber threats, such as ransomware attacks, regardless of how they attempt to infiltrate your organization? Holistic, unified, and layered cyber security protects your organization’s critical assets—data, users, customers, devices, and extended network.

Ransomware attacks can take your entire organization hostage, locking up critical resources, such as web, email, and servers until you pay the ransom (for example, bitcoins). The Los Angeles Times reported that “2016 is shaping up as the year of ransomware, and the FBI isn’t helping.” In fact, cyber-criminals collected US$209 million in the first three months of 2016 by extorting businesses and institutions. At that rate, ransomware is set to inflict US$1 billion per year. Since law enforcement, including the FBI, is essentially powerless in most cases, it’s up to you to defend your organization.

Ransomware criminals are targeting all industries, from healthcare to education and manufacturing to government agencies, including local, state, and federal. Their non-discriminate attacks mean that small, medium, and large businesses are all at risk. It’s not just about losing money directly to ransomware criminals, which can range from a hundred dollars to millions. Ransomware attacks cause:

  • Drastic loss of business
  • Costly repairs, including the need to overhaul and upgrade entire infrastructures
  • Direct harm to customers (for example, unable to treat medical patients or respond to 911 calls)
  • Legal fees and necessitate indemnification of customers and victims

The amount it would cost for you to fully recover from a ransomware attack should be considered in your security solution TCO analysis. Due to the persistence and sophistication of today’s ransomware attackers, it’s not a matter of if, but when an attack will occur.

Keep Your Business Running Safely

A comprehensive cyber security architecture can protect your business using defenses that span from networks to the DNS layer and email to endpoints. Ransomware software is becoming increasingly pervasive, persistent, and stealthy. It is quickly evolving beyond attacks on individuals to target entire networks. With more semi-automatic propagation methods, ransomware authors can capitalize on more opportunities to breach networks and move laterally. In fact, CBS News reported a new type of ransomware that can infect your system without even being clicked on.

Since ransomware software can infiltrate your organization in multiple ways, and has the potential to control your entire network, you need advanced, unified, and layered cyber defense. This means that no matter how robust a certain security solution might be, a single standalone solution simply won’t be sufficient. Instead, you need to take a portfolio-based approach, rather than a single product. Your security solution portfolio should not be patched together from various vendors. Disparate solutions can create security siloes, massive vulnerabilities throughout your network. Simply put, solutions from different vendors don’t know about each other, which can create gaps for cyber threats to penetrate. Purchasing your entire security portfolio from a single vendor ensures your solutions will work together to prevent attacks where possible, detect if they gain access to systems, and contain to limit damage.

When assessing your options for security solutions, you should look for the following capabilities:

  • Device protection: Protects devices on and off your corporate network. Blocks DNS requests before a device can even connect to malicious sites hosting ransomware.
  • Endpoint protection: Policy-based approach to network security that defends components such as PCs, laptops, smart phones, tablets, and specialized equipment (for example, barcode scanners). Blocks ransomware files from opening on endpoints.
  • Email security: Denies spam and phishing emails as well as malicious email attachments and URLs. Email is one of the most common methods ransomware attacks exploit to infiltrate your system. Defending your email should therefore be one of your top priorities.
  • File analysis: Uses static and dynamic file analysis to block malware trying to infiltrate your IT environment.
  • Next-generation firewall: Fully integrated threat-focused firewalls mitigate advanced threats quicker (for example, block known threats and command-and-control callbacks) and streamline operations. The best next-generation firewalls will allow you to stop more threats and get more from your resources.
  • Network segmentation: Dynamically segments your network, which maintains highly secure access to services and applications. This makes it possible to establish safe boundaries between users and sensitive data. Your employees get access to all the resources and applications they need for optimal performance without the risk of accidental admittance to critical data. Network segmentation also prevents the lateral movement of cyber threats.
  • Network telemetry: Advanced network and data center visibility, analytics, and protection delivers improved network segmentation, operations, incident response, and compliance. Certain security solutions use network telemetry, data collected from network devices, to transform your entire network into a sensor grid and strengthen your defenses.

Advanced Security Support

In some cases, security solutions are only as good as the services behind them. When researching security solutions for your organization, be sure to look into the types of services you can leverage after purchasing. Especially if you have a lean IT staff, or don’t have a dedicated IT members at all, high-quality security services can help you get the most out of your solutions. For example, look for services that will help with the deployment and integration of your new security products, or even the complete management of your products. It’s also good to know what your options are for emergency incident response services for immediate triage and remediation to mitigate damage in the event of a cyber attack or breach.

In a similar vein, security solutions are sometimes only as good as the intelligence behind them. Look for security solutions backed by advanced threat research and intelligence. The best security products are those that receive automatic updates, threat intelligence feeds, to help you keep pace with all the latest threats and maintain up-to-date protection. Threat intelligence also allows your security solutions to correlate attacks against your organization with industry-wide attacks. These correlational findings enable pooled resources and promote expedited remediation.

Visibility

Achieving the network-wide visibility and control necessary to prevent as well as quickly detect, contain, and remediate threats is critical to your defense. These capabilities keep your business running continuously and safely. You should consider solutions that offer full-stack visibility from physical layer to application layer and from attacker to target. The greater the visibility, the more you can correlate information, make intelligent analyses, and take action, either manually or automatically.

Security Automation and Adaptability

The less you need to do yourself, the less you have to know, the less dedicated and highly trained staff you need, and the less time and effort required. Security automation allows you to do more with less while maintaining focus on you top business objectives. Advanced cyber security can adapt your defenses to dynamic changes in your network, files, and hosts, maintaining high levels of protection without the need for administrator intervention. Impact flags automatically alert security analysts to the most critical events, helping them prioritize and make the best use of their time and effort.

Continuous Analysis with Retrospective Security

While preventative security is best, there’s simply no security solution available yet that is 100 percent effective at blocking all threats from breaching your system. This makes retrospective security an essential capability in your security portfolio. Retrospective security provides protection after an attack, rounding out your defense of the entire attack continuum—before, during, and after an attack. If you’ve already been compromised by ransomware, you need to scope the damage and stop it from spreading. Look for solutions backed by big data analytics. This allows for the continuous investigation of unclassified data beyond the event horizon. This process defines the initial point-in-time disposition of an object as clean, unknown, or malicious. Using this continuous analysis and global security intelligence, you can track, analyze, and remediate advanced, evasive malware. As part of this, check for solutions that maintain data from attacks, files, and domains so that similar attacks can be prevented and blocked automatically.

Spend More to Save More

You have a bottom line you need to respect, and it’s understandable that you want to keep your cyber security expenditures at a minimum. However, cyber threats are not going away. Each day that passes brings you a day closer to a security breach. Keep in mind that your security solutions have the potential to pay for themselves with the money they save you by successfully thwarting just a single attack.