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.