Getting Ahead of Today’s Fast-Growing Ransomware Threats

The evolving threat landscape

For ransomware gangs, the pandemic has been a goldmine. Always studying your attack surface for the right time and place to strike, criminals waited patiently as remote workforces grew and vulnerabilities multiplied. Then to no one’s surprise, success soon followed a pattern that will continue if companies fail to adopt more proactive security approaches.

Some reports estimate that ransomware attacks have risen by nearly 500 percent with verticals like banking experiencing an even higher spike. Trend Micro reports that ransomware attacks are up more than 1,300 percent from over the first half of 2021 or the same period in 2020.

It’s not only about the number of attacks, payments have also skyrocketed. Alejandro Mayorkas, the U.S. Homeland Security Secretary, estimated that victims shelled out $350 million in payments in 2020. According to another estimate from Cybersecurity Ventures, “ransomware will cost the global economy approximately $20 billion in 2021, a 57-fold increase from 2015.

A big takeaway for everyone is that prevention is not a security strategy, it’s a path to continued failure. Security teams must adopt proactive approaches that let them see what a cybercriminal sees 24/7 and then eliminate these vulnerabilities before they are compromised.

ForeNova's Attack Surface Blueprint

Being proactive begins with ForeNova’s Attack Surface Blueprint, delivered by NovaCommand. The blueprint provides a complete and dynamic view of your IT landscape, including the network and all devices. It helps identify blind spots to shine a light on the most common exposures that attackers can easily exploit.

NovaCommand is a unified command center that eliminates the need to use multiple tools to detect various hidden threats – whether new or existing. By leveraging behavioral detection, backed by thousands of network signals and more than 800 artificial intelligence (AI) models, we validate, triage, and establish root causes in minutes or hours instead of days to.

• Eliminate false positives to ensure that the team’s attention is focused on the real threats. This includes those that are already inside their network.
• Prioritize each threat based on the potential risk they pose to the business and quarantines suspicious files.
• Trigger the correct response actions while eliminating suspicious domains. These responses, which can be to block ports, trigger an endpoint scan or block a port on a physical switch, can be executed automatically or manually.
• Provide incident responders with the tools they need to make risk-based decisions and mitigate attacks in near real-time.

Over the last year and a half, cybercriminals have thrived by exploiting a slew of new vulnerabilities that companies have failed to secure. In this new environment, it’s more vital than ever for companies to think like an attacker. That’s why ForeNova solutions are so effective—they were designed by ransomware experts, using data gathered from thousands of ransomware attacks and undetected threats. It’s through this experience and these deep insights that we are able to deliver customers an attack surface blueprint that includes the intel required to move quickly and confidently, getting ahead of today’s cybercriminals and responding to threats before they wreak havoc on a business.