Proactive Prevention: Your Pathway To Lowering Costs of Ransomware
Month: December 2022
Publish Date
07/12/2022
Categories
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Discover What You Need To Be Ransomware Ready
Mimecast’s newly released ‘State of Ransomware Readiness 2022’ report here makes for bad news, good news reading.
Based on interviews with 1,100 cybersecurity experts across more than 10 countries, including the UAE, the report points to an ever-increasing incidence of ransomware which now makes it one of the primary threats to organizations. Indeed, it has apparently become so widespread and costly, that many insurers are reconsidering pay outs and excluding some forms of ransomware attacks from their coverage – making the need to prevent more pressing.
“On a positive note, although the threat is growing, there are opportunities for businesses to evolve their cybersecurity strategies, and address the challenges of complex enterprise networks, limited resources, stretched teams, and complex threats,” says the report. “This means businesses must focus not only on mitigation, but proactive prevention, to improve their threat detection capabilities and attack responses – and ultimately, lower the personal and business cost of ransomware.”
The Findings:
The downside, the report found that 77% of cybersecurity professionals are facing mounting pressure from ransomware attacks compared to 2021. Two-fifths of respondents say they had experienced significant downtime due to a cyberattack and 44% of businesses in the UAE reported revenue loss due to a ransomware attack over the past year.
A third of respondents said their cybersecurity teams were suffering from increased staff absences due to post-attack burnout with 46% of decision-makers in the UAE thinking of leaving their role in the next two years due to stress. The answer, they believe, is bigger cybersecurity budgets which they say need to rise by around 28%.
The professionals said they believe ransomware attacks are now virtually inevitable, with 49% citing file backup and recovery as the most critical technology for reducing the risk and damage of ransomware attacks.
The Pro-active Prevention Approach :
The report concludes that in the face of the growing ransomware threat, security must go beyond checking compliance and mitigation boxes.
“Proactive prevention will reduce the likelihood of attacks and lower their impact when they do succeed,” it says. “Given the complexity of most enterprise networks, organizations will often benefit from an integrated approach – adopting a cybersecurity mesh architecture that adapts security protections to each asset in the network. This increases visibility, minimizes dwell time, and helps busy teams identify and address attacks more readily.”
The report recommends cybersecurity leaders focus on proactively reducing the chances of a ransomware attack causing disruption by:
- Integrating security tools to improve threat detection and responses, alleviating pressures on busy teams: Implementing a cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA) can connect separate security tools to adapt protections to each network asset, creating a zero-trust environment. Using an extended detection and response (XDR) architecture can unify detection, investigation, and response by leveraging real-time data from multiple security systems – and then automatically instructing the security systems to respond – this turns email systems into an organization’s eyes and ears, enabling greater threat detection.
- Ensuring good security fundamental practices are in place to reduce vulnerabilities: With employees often targeted directly by attackers, security awareness training will improve cybersecurity posture and as email is a particularly threatening attack vector, robust, up-to-date email security solutions are also a valuable investment.
- Evaluating crisis planning to understand the real consequences of an attack: Have the best disaster recovery strategies in place and ensure best practices, including regular data backups, are followed throughout your organization which will also help highlight any business continuity planning gaps.
- Ensuring C-suite consider it a business prerogative and do not leave the financial and personnel resource burden to IT teams: The good news is 77% of cybersecurity decision-makers feel supported by senior leadership but bigger budgets would help relieve the strain.
Where to from here:
If you want to ensure you are ransomware ready, ask Cobweb for a security posture consultation. We’ll identify any gaps and help you plug them. Call us now and stay safe! +97144553100 or email: sales.uae@cobweb.com.