Your Threat Intelligence Program is Critical to Mitigating Ransomware and Cyber Extortion Risks

By Delfina Chain

Ransomware and cyber extortion are responsible for billions of dollars in losses each year across industries. While some high-profile attacks and success stories reach the mainstream, they are a tiny percentage of the true number of incidents and actual payouts made to adversaries. As we continue to see multiple Ransomware families and new cyber extortion techniques impacting businesses and public organizations across the globe, leadership teams are now aware their organizations are not exempt from suffering a ransomware incident. It’s important that the team is prepared to handle these incidents. 

Prior to being directly impacted, teams should prepare their organizations for these types of incidents. Ransomware and cyber extortion training is an important step in aligning critical stakeholders. Training must focus on educating the teams on how ransomware works, why organizations become infected, the evolution of this threat, profiles of attackers, insights relevant to the specific industry. With this understanding, teams can effectively assess their current plans, and properly prepare for these incidents.

When an organization is targeted by ransomware or cyber extortion, it must quickly determine the extent of the attack, determine the response, and mitigate the impact. Plans and policies must be tested to ensure readiness in the event of an attack. 

Flashpoint Professional Services offers a Threat Response & Readiness Subscription that helps organizations prepare for, as well as quickly assess and respond to a ransomware or cyber extortion attack. FPS helps organizations by tailoring the response and recovery of internal systems, evaluating the credibility of the attacker, acquiring cryptocurrency on behalf of the impacted organization, negotiating and enabling a safe transaction, and finally returning to business continuity. 

As organizations develop specific incident response plans to minimize ransomware associated impacts and train their teams to respond to these events, threat intelligence programs play a key role in the mitigation and reduction of potential risks and threats on a daily basis. 

Use our threat intelligence platform to reduce risks directly or indirectly associated with ransomware events: 

• Reset the passwords of privileged user accounts that have been compromised through our compromised credentials monitoring 

• Check out our most recent webinar: Targeted Ransomware and its Impacts on Incident Response.