Ransomware Prevention

The key to ransomware prevention

Ransomware attacks continue to cripple organizations large and small. Highly successful and extremely profitable for cyber criminals, ransomware attacks have shut down businesses across a wide range of verticals, costing millions of dollars in ransoms paid, damage to reputation, and loss of productivity. Understandably, ransomware prevention is top of mind for executives and security teams alike. While no company is completely immune from determined cyber criminals, a relentless focus on cyber security hygiene can help to both avoid attacks and to minimize damage when attacks are successful.

Good security hygiene requires cybersecurity controls, security practices, and people to perform effectively every day. Yet, many organizations lack the visibility to know whether their security performance is strong enough to fend off ransomware attacks or mitigate their effects. BitSight is enabling companies to visualize the vulnerabilities in their ecosystem and build programs that can proactively close security gaps before they are exploited.

The tools for ransomware prevention

Cybersecurity visibility into your expanding attack surface is the key to ransomware prevention. After all, you can’t secure what you can’t see. Despite all the latest security solutions, firewalls, and threat intelligence technology, it only takes a single unpatched cloud asset or a vendor with poor security practices to enable a ransomware attack to land within your network.

Ransomware prevention depends on your ability to visualize the common vulnerabilities and exploits in your IT environment and take swift action to address them before they’re discovered by attackers. There are two strategies that can help to accomplish this task: continuous monitoring and security ratings.

Continuous monitoring

In contrast to annual or periodic security audits, continuous monitoring delivers immediate insight into your ecosystem’s risk profile. By continuously assessing and scanning your network for vulnerabilities, security teams can gain immediate insight into your risk profile at any given time. Continuous monitoring offers insight into the entire ecosystem’s security posture, from internal organizations to third- and even fourth-party vendors. This is critical, as more than 90% of companies report experiencing a breach that originated within a vendor’s IT environment.

Security ratings

Security ratings provide an easy-to-understand measurement of an organization’s security performance. By monitoring changes in the security ratings of your organization as well as third-party vendors, you can gain data-driven insights into your greatest areas of risk, allowing your security teams to swiftly remediate them.

For organizations that want to learn how to avoid ransomware, BitSight enables companies to combines security ratings and continuous monitoring to dramatically improve visibility into security performance.

Ransomware prevention with BitSight

BitSight offers the world’s leading Security Ratings platform for tracking security performance and managing third-party risk. BitSight’s Security Ratings work much like credit ratings, determining the security performance of an organization based on data that is externally observable.

Rather than conducting periodic scans, BitSight continuously measures more than 250 billion security measurements on a daily basis to provide an objective security rating based on organization’s performance in 23 risk vectors. These include in categories like compromised and exposed systems, patching rates, critical vulnerabilities, user behavior, and publicly disclosed data breaches. BitSight issues ratings every day, providing near-real-time insight into risk within the ecosystems of organizations and their third-party vendors. Ratings range from 250 to 900 – the higher the rating, the more effective the organization is at implementing strong security practices.

BitSight Security Ratings provide a common language that is understandable by both technical and non-technical employees, executives, and board members. And most importantly for ransomware prevention, independent research shows that BitSight Security Ratings correlate to data breaches. For example, companies with a Security Rating of 500 or lower are nearly five times more likely to have a breach than those with a rating of 700 or higher.

What research reveals about ransomware prevention

BitSight’s research team has analyzed hundreds of ransomware events in recent years to understand how security ratings reveal the probability that an organization would experience a ransomware event. The analysis benchmarked the performance and ransomware history of number of companies against organizations with a high BitSight rating (750+) for security effectiveness.

The data showed that organizations with a rating lower than 600 are 6.4 times more likely to be a ransomware victim than a highly rated company. BitSight’s research also revealed that poor patching performance correlates to a nearly sevenfold increase in ransomware risk for companies with a C grade or lower in BitSight’s study.

Why choose BitSight?

As the world’s leading Security Rating service, BitSight delivers actionable ratings that enable security and risk teams to measure the security performance of their organization as well as risk in their supply chain. Through continuous monitoring of large sets of objective and independently verified security metrics, BitSight generates ratings that are proven to correlate with breaches and that reveal the effectiveness of an organization’s cybersecurity programs. For many of the world’s leading organizations, BitSight Security Ratings are an essential tool for superior security governance, cyber security assessment, and cloud security posture management.

BitSight’s Security Ratings platform is home to the most robust community of cyber risk professionals across all industries. BitSight is the choice of 7 of the top 10 largest cyber insurers, 4 of the top 5 investment banks, and all the Big 4 accounting firms. Over 20% of the world’s countries trust BitSight to protect national security, and 25% of Fortune 500 companies use BitSight to enhance security performance.