How to Stop Ransomware in Nashville
Nashville has a thriving economy.
According to INC, it’s the 11th best place in America for startups, major corporations, health care, and mid-to-large size businesses. For years, businesses and entrepreneurs have flocked to Nashville — translating it into a distinction for the fast-growing southern city.
Regardless of your Nashville business type, there is a rising concern about ransomware attacks, and it’s your responsibility to stop ransomware from infecting your business.
Ransomware encrypts business files and locks you out of your business’ computers until you pay a ransom fee. Your business needs to protect its computer from a ransomware attack proactively..
For over three decades, Kraft Technology Group (KTG) has helped businesses in Nashville protect themselves against ransomware attacks and mitigate infection. We can help your business stop ransomware with several strategies.
1. Providing Reliable Data Backup Solutions for Your Business
The best way to defend your business against ransomware attacks is to have a reliable backup. In the event of a successful ransomware attack, the backup will allow you to restore business data quickly and minimize downtime.
Your backup must be reliable to ensure business continuity even when a ransomware attack is successful. You can prepare your business backup for ransomware attack by:
- Using offsite backup — on the cloud or a physical server in another location — so that cyber attacks cannot compromise the data in any way
- Executing regular backup to ensure you can bounce back as quickly as possible after a ransomware attack
- Encrypting your back to ensure that data breaches don’t compromise it
- Regular testing of backed up data to ensure your backup is viable for restoration
Your business needs a continuity strategy to ensure the business’ workflow doesn’t stop due to ransomware denying you access to business data.
Kraft Technology Group can help your business implement a proactive IT strategy for backup restoration and recovery in the event of a ransomware attack.
2. Offering IT System Updates that Eliminate Vulnerability
Ransomware gangs love system vulnerability.
As with any other malware, ransomware attacks are becoming more effective and sophisticated. Outdated software lacks the latest security patches that stop ransomware, which present a security loophole that attackers can use to infect your system.
Regular updates will repair security vulnerabilities, giving attackers a difficult task of infecting your computer system with ransomware. You need to keep your business devices updated.
Invest in the latest anti-virus and anti-malware software, and ensure they automatically update. Our IT experts can help your business:
- Execute regular updates on your firmware, anti-malware software, operating system, and other apps to seal any existing security flaws
- Run security scans to identify vulnerabilities that new ransomware versions could exploit
- Turn on auto-update of software, antimalware software, and operating system to ensure your business always have the latest security patches
- Fortify your network security with timely patches, updates, and upgrades through the cybersecurity services
3. Help You Cultivate the Cybersecurity Culture in Your Nashville Business
Statistics show that employees’ mistakes are the leading cause of ransomware attacks. The mistakes include:
- Clicking on malicious links in spam email because attackers usually deliver ransomware through email
- Employees visiting dangerous sites and downloading malicious files
- Sharing business credentials
- Usage of business computer
Your employee can be your business’s weakest link when stopping ransomware attacks. However, you can turn them into your strongest defense against ransomware attacks. You can train them to cultivate a cybersecurity culture.
Run a security awareness training to teach your employees about the risks of the internet at work and at home. You can train your employees in the following:
- Email security — training them to avoid clicking links in spam emails and instead, forward such emails to your IT team
- Avoiding plugging unknown storage devices into business computers since hackers may have infected them and left them in an open area to entice employees to use them on your system
- Downloading files from known sources to lower the risk of downloading ransomware
- How to use business computers — advertising them only to do company work on the company machine and limit personal activities on their work device
- Avoiding doing business work on public WiFi because it can easily compromise a set of credentials and a device
- What to do in case of a ransomware attack
The solutions can protect your business against ransomware attacks before they happen. However, encouraging cybersecurity culture is not 100% effective because attackers create new tactics every day to make ransomware attacks successful.
Kraft Group will be your knowledgeable partner to help you build a strong cybersecurity culture in your Nashville business. We’ll help your team cooperate and collaborate using security protocols with user-friendly tools.
4. Deploy an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to Detect Malicious Activity
There isn’t a 100% safety measure against ransomware. As a result, you’d want to monitor your network system for malicious activity. You can use Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to compare network logs to known threats. The system will protect any advanced ransomware threat from entering your system.
IDS is integral because it makes it difficult for an attacker to access your network undetected. More importantly, IDS can detect multiple types of threats and pin the point of attack.
In other words, it spots both internal and external threats and excellent in catching all attacks.
5. Offer Regular Vulnerability Scan
Regardless of how confident you’re about your network safety, you can’t be completely sure because ransomware attacks get sophisticated every day. The continuous sophistication of ransomware makes regular scanning necessary.
After all, vulnerability on your network eases an attacker’s task of launching a ransomware attack.
Kraft Group can help your business run regular vulnerability scans and penetration testing to identify hidden dangers lurking within your business network. Penetration testing will give you a real-world look at vulnerabilities that hackers might exploit to run ransomware.
The penetration testing involves:
- A technician examining your business defense to identify weaknesses that a hacker could exploit
- The expert will attempt to exploit the vulnerability just like a hacker would do
- A review of findings that will help you cover the vulnerabilities
You can do penetration testing on the specific systems of your business, such as:
- Website
- Social network
- WiFi network
- Network vulnerability
With the active evolution of ransomware, you might need to shift your focus from a more defensive approach to a more active approach.
6. Present Endpoint Anti-Virus Security
Endpoint antiviruses detect, prevent, and eliminate ransomware on devices.
You install endpoint antivirus solutions both inside and outside your business’s firewall, including, desktop, laptop, computer server, and even mobile devices.
Antivirus solutions have an extensive database of ransomware signatures and definitions. The software finds ransomware by scanning files and directories and looking for patterns that match the ransomware signature and definition in files.
In other words, anti-viruses can only recognize known threats, meaning the option you’re using must constantly be on the lookout for new malware to add to their database.
Since new ransomware is developed all the time, you need regular updates. Failure to update makes your antivirus unable to recognize the latest ransomware, leaving you open to attack.
7. Help You Put Policies and Protocol to Follow When Under Ransomware Attack
Your business needs a plan and policies to follow in the event a successful ransomware attack. The plan should describe the procedure and communication your IT team should share when under a ransomware attack.
The procedure can be as simple as directing your team to:
- Notify the right partners about the ransomware attack
- Disconnect the infected devices from the network connection to prevent spread.
- Turn off the organization’s WiFi, disconnect from the internet, and disable any core network connection.
- Reset the credential but ensure you’re not locking yourself out of the system your organization needs for recovery.
- Wipe infected devices safely before reinstalling the operating system.
- Scan your devices to ensure they are ransomware-free before restoring the backup. Your business should ensure that the backup and the device you’re restoring are malware-free.
- Connect the device to a vulnerability-free network to download, install, and update the operating system and all other software.
- Monitor your network traffic and run end-point antiviruses to identify if any infection remains.
The Kraft Group can provide you with more detailed information about remediation processes and technical approaches to formulate protocol your employees can follow in the event of a successful ransomware attack.
Your Trusted Partner to Stop Ransomware in Nashville, TN
Regardless of your business type, you need effectively managed cybersecurity to protect you against ransomware. You need protection against the ongoing threat of ransomware.
For over three decades, Kraft Technology Group has been helping businesses in Nashville to stop ransomware attacks. We have been:
- Offering robust disaster recovery measures to ensure business continuity even in the event of the most disastrous ransomware attack
- Delivering anti-phishing solutions so that employees don’t fall into hackers’ deceptive emails
- Patching business systems so that cybercriminals don’t get points to infiltrate into organizations’ network
- Helping businesses familiarize themselves with cyber criminal tactics so that organizations can be aware and protect themselves
- Recommending the right endpoint antivirus software to detect, prevent, and eliminate ransomware on organizations’ computers
- Monitoring organizations’ networks for malicious activity to stop ransomware before it turns into a business disaster
- Scanning organization networks to identify vulnerabilities before hackers can find them and exploit them
We invite you to discuss how to stop ransomware in your business with our cybersecurity team. Contact us today to get started.
Thanks to our colleagues at Velocity IT in Dallas for their help with this research.
