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Ransomware : Your Worst Information Technology Disaster
Ransomware has become a too-frequent cyberplague that poses an existential threat for organizations poorly prepared for an assault. Different iterations of ransomware such as Dharma, Fusob, Bad Rabbit, Syskey and MongoLock cryptoworms have been replicating for many years and continue to inflict damage. More recent versions of ransomware like Ryuk, Maze, Sodinokibi, Netwalker, Conti or Nephilim, as well as additional unnamed viruses, not only encrypt on-line data files but also infect all available system backup. Information synched to the cloud can also be corrupted. In a poorly architected data protection solution, this can render automated restore operations useless and effectively sets the datacenter back to square one.

Getting back on-line programs and data after a crypto-ransomware intrusion becomes a race against the clock as the victim tries its best to stop the spread, eradicate the virus, and resume business-critical operations. Due to the fact that ransomware takes time to replicate, attacks are frequently sprung on weekends and holidays, when successful penetrations tend to take longer to notice. This multiplies the difficulty of promptly mobilizing and coordinating a capable mitigation team.

Progent has a range of support services for securing organizations from crypto-ransomware penetrations. These include staff education to help recognize and avoid phishing scams, ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) for remote monitoring and management, along with deployment of modern security appliances with artificial intelligence technology from SentinelOne to discover and extinguish day-zero threats rapidly. Progent also provides the assistance of expert ransomware recovery engineers with the track record and perseverance to rebuild a breached system as quickly as possible.

Progent's Ransomware Recovery Services
Following a crypto-ransomware event, paying the ransom in cryptocurrency does not guarantee that merciless criminals will return the needed keys to unencrypt any of your information. Kaspersky determined that 17% of ransomware victims never restored their data after having sent off the ransom, resulting in additional losses. The risk is also very costly. Ryuk ransoms are typically a few hundred thousand dollars. For larger organizations, the ransom can reach millions. The fallback is to setup from scratch the key components of your IT environment. Without access to essential system backups, this requires a broad range of skills, well-coordinated team management, and the capability to work non-stop until the recovery project is over.

For twenty years, Progent has offered expert IT services for businesses throughout the U.S. and has achieved Microsoft's Gold Partnership certification status in the Datacenter and Cloud Productivity competencies. Progent's pool of subject matter experts includes consultants who have been awarded top industry certifications in foundation technologies like Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, and major distributions of Linux. Progent's cybersecurity experts have earned internationally-renowned certifications including CISM, CISSP, ISACA CRISC, GIAC, and CMMC 2.0. (Visit Progent's certifications). Progent also has experience in financial management and ERP application software. This breadth of experience provides Progent the capability to knowledgably understand necessary systems and organize the surviving components of your computer network system following a ransomware penetration and configure them into a functioning system.

Progent's ransomware team of experts uses best of breed project management systems to orchestrate the complicated restoration process. Progent knows the importance of acting quickly and in unison with a client's management and Information Technology team members to assign priority to tasks and to get critical systems back online as fast as possible.

Customer Case Study: A Successful Crypto-Ransomware Attack Recovery
A customer engaged Progent after their company was penetrated by the Ryuk ransomware virus. Ryuk is generally considered to have been created by North Korean state cybercriminals, suspected of using technology leaked from the U.S. National Security Agency. Ryuk targets specific businesses with little or no ability to sustain operational disruption and is among the most lucrative examples of ransomware. Major victims include Data Resolution, a California-based information warehousing and cloud computing firm, and the Chicago Tribune. Progent's customer is a single-location manufacturing business headquartered in the Chicago metro area and has about 500 employees. The Ryuk intrusion had paralyzed all business operations and manufacturing capabilities. Most of the client's data backups had been on-line at the start of the attack and were encrypted. The client was evaluating paying the ransom demand (more than two hundred thousand dollars) and wishfully thinking for the best, but in the end utilized Progent.

Progent worked with the customer to rapidly determine and prioritize the critical services that needed to be restored to make it possible to continue departmental operations:

• Active Directory
• E-Mail
• MRP System

Within 48 hours, Progent was able to rebuild Active Directory services to its pre-intrusion state. Progent then helped perform setup and storage recovery on needed servers. All Exchange Server ties and configuration information were usable, which accelerated the restore of Exchange. Progent was also able to locate local OST files (Outlook Off-Line Folder Files) on various workstations to recover email data. A recent offline backup of the client's financials/ERP systems made them able to restore these essential applications back available to users. Although a large amount of work was left to recover completely from the Ryuk event, essential services were restored quickly:

Over the following month important milestones in the restoration process were completed through close collaboration between Progent engineers and the customer:

• In-house web applications were returned to operation with no loss of information.
• The MailStore Exchange Server containing more than 4 million archived emails was brought online and accessible to users.
• CRM/Orders/Invoicing/Accounts Payable/Accounts Receivables/Inventory modules were 100% recovered.
• A new Palo Alto 850 firewall was brought online.
• 90% of the user desktops and notebooks were back into operation.

Conclusion
A probable company-ending disaster was avoided by results-oriented professionals, a broad range of IT skills, and tight teamwork. Although in retrospect the ransomware attack detailed here would have been prevented with current security technology solutions and recognized best practices, user and IT administrator education, and appropriate security procedures for data backup and proper patching controls, the fact remains that state-sponsored cyber criminals from Russia, North Korea and elsewhere are relentless and will continue. If you do fall victim to a ransomware incursion, remember that Progent's roster of experts has extensive experience in ransomware virus defense, remediation, and information systems disaster recovery.

To review or download a PDF version of this customer case study, click:
Progent's Ransomware Recovery Case Study Datasheet. (PDF - 282 KB)

Additional Ransomware Protection Services Available from Progent
Progent can provide businesses in Santa Cruz a variety of online monitoring and security evaluation services designed to help you to minimize the threat from ransomware. These services incorporate modern artificial intelligence capability to uncover new variants of ransomware that can get past traditional signature-based security solutions.

• ProSight LAN Watch: Server and Desktop Monitoring and Management
  ProSight LAN Watch is Progent's server and desktop monitoring managed service that incorporates state-of-the-art remote monitoring and management technology to help keep your IT system running efficiently by checking the health of critical computers that power your business network. When ProSight LAN Watch detects a problem, an alert is sent immediately to your specified IT management staff and your assigned Progent engineering consultant so all potential issues can be addressed before they can disrupt productivity. Find out more details about ProSight LAN Watch server and desktop remote monitoring services.

• ProSight LAN Watch with NinjaOne RMM: Unified RMM Solution for Networks, Servers, and Desktops
  ProSight LAN Watch with NinjaOne RMM software delivers a centralized, cloud-driven platform for monitoring and managing your client-server infrastructure by providing an environment for streamlining common tedious jobs. These include health monitoring, patch management, automated remediation, endpoint configuration, backup and recovery, A/V defense, secure remote access, standard and custom scripts, resource inventory, endpoint profile reporting, and troubleshooting assistance. When ProSight LAN Watch with NinjaOne RMM uncovers a serious problem, it sends an alarm to your designated IT management staff and your assigned Progent consultant so that emerging issues can be fixed before they impact your network. Find out more about ProSight LAN Watch with NinjaOne RMM server and desktop monitoring services.

• ProSight WAN Watch: Network Infrastructure Remote Monitoring and Management
  Progent's ProSight WAN Watch is an infrastructure management service that makes it simple and inexpensive for smaller businesses to map out, track, optimize and debug their connectivity appliances like routers, firewalls, and wireless controllers as well as servers, printers, endpoints and other networked devices. Incorporating state-of-the-art Remote Monitoring and Management technology, WAN Watch ensures that infrastructure topology maps are always updated, copies and manages the configuration information of almost all devices connected to your network, monitors performance, and generates alerts when issues are detected. By automating complex network management activities, ProSight WAN Watch can knock hours off ordinary tasks like network mapping, expanding your network, locating appliances that require critical updates, or isolating performance problems. Learn more details about ProSight WAN Watch network infrastructure management services.

• ProSight Reporting: Real-time Reporting for Ticketing and Network Monitoring Platforms
  ProSight Reporting is an expanding line of real-time and in-depth reporting utilities created to integrate with the industry's leading ticketing and remote network monitoring platforms including ConnectWise Manage, ConnectWise Automate, Customer Thermometer, Auvik, and SentinelOne. ProSight Reporting uses Microsoft Graph and features color coding to surface and contextualize key issues like inconsistent support follow-through or endpoints with out-of-date AVs. By identifying ticketing or network health concerns concisely and in near-real time, ProSight Reporting improves network value, lowers management hassle, and saves money. For details, visit ProSight Reporting for ticketing and network monitoring applications.

• ProSight Data Protection Services: Backup and Disaster Recovery Services
  Progent has partnered with leading backup/restore software companies to produce ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS), a family of subscription-based management offerings that provide backup-as-a-service. ProSight DPS products manage and track your data backup operations and allow transparent backup and fast restoration of important files, applications, images, and virtual machines. ProSight DPS lets your business recover from data loss caused by hardware failures, natural calamities, fire, malware like ransomware, user mistakes, malicious insiders, or application glitches. Managed backup services in the ProSight DPS product line include ProSight DPS Altaro VM Backup, ProSight 365 Total Backup (formerly Altaro 365 Backup), ProSight ECHO Backup using Barracuda dedicated storage, and ProSight MSP360 Hybrid Backup. Your Progent consultant can assist you to determine which of these managed backup services are best suited for your network.

• ProSight Email Guard: Inbound and Outbound Spam Filtering and Data Leakage Protection
  ProSight Email Guard is Progent's spam filtering service that incorporates the infrastructure of leading data security vendors to deliver centralized management and comprehensive protection for your inbound and outbound email. The powerful architecture of Email Guard integrates cloud-based filtering with an on-premises security gateway appliance to provide complete protection against spam, viruses, Denial of Service Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks (DHAs), and other email-based malware. Email Guard's cloud filter acts as a preliminary barricade and blocks most unwanted email from making it to your network firewall. This reduces your exposure to inbound attacks and saves network bandwidth and storage. Email Guard's onsite security gateway appliance adds a further layer of inspection for incoming email. For outgoing email, the onsite gateway provides AV and anti-spam protection, policy-based Data Loss Prevention, and email encryption. The local gateway can also help Microsoft Exchange Server to track and protect internal email traffic that originates and ends inside your corporate firewall. For more details, visit Email Guard spam and content filtering.

• ProSight Duo Multi-Factor Authentication: ID Confirmation, Endpoint Remediation, and Protected Single Sign-on
  Progent's Duo MFA services incorporate Cisco's Duo technology to protect against stolen passwords by using two-factor authentication. Duo supports single-tap identity verification with Apple iOS, Google Android, and other out-of-band devices. Using Duo 2FA, when you log into a secured online account and enter your password you are requested to verify your identity via a device that only you possess and that uses a different ("out-of-band") network channel. A broad selection of devices can be utilized as this second means of ID validation such as an iPhone or Android or wearable, a hardware/software token, a landline phone, etc. You may designate several verification devices. For more information about Duo two-factor identity authentication services, visit Cisco Duo MFA two-factor authentication (2FA) services for access security.

• Outsourced/Co-managed Help Desk: Support Desk Managed Services
  Progent's Help Center services enable your information technology team to outsource Support Desk services to Progent or split activity for support services transparently between your internal network support group and Progent's nationwide roster of certified IT support technicians, engineers and subject matter experts. Progent's Shared Service Desk provides a smooth extension of your corporate support group. End user access to the Help Desk, delivery of support, escalation, ticket generation and tracking, performance measurement, and maintenance of the support database are cohesive whether incidents are resolved by your core network support organization, by Progent's team, or by a combination. Read more about Progent's outsourced/shared Service Center services.

• Progent Active Protection Against Ransomware: AI-based Ransomware Detection and Remediation
  Progent's Active Defense Against Ransomware is an endpoint protection managed service that utilizes next generation behavior-based machine learning technology to guard endpoint devices and physical and virtual servers against modern malware assaults such as ransomware and email phishing, which easily get by traditional signature-matching anti-virus tools. Progent Active Security Monitoring services safeguard on-premises and cloud-based resources and offers a single platform to manage the complete malware attack progression including blocking, detection, mitigation, cleanup, and post-attack forensics. Top capabilities include single-click rollback using Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and automatic network-wide immunization against new threats. Find out more about Progent's ransomware protection and recovery services.

• ProSight IT Asset Management: Network Documentation Management
  ProSight IT Asset Management service is an IT infrastructure documentation management service that allows you to capture, update, retrieve and protect data about your IT infrastructure, processes, applications, and services. You can quickly find passwords or IP addresses and be warned about impending expirations of SSLs or warranties. By updating and managing your IT infrastructure documentation, you can eliminate as much as half of time thrown away trying to find vital information about your IT network. ProSight IT Asset Management includes a centralized repository for storing and sharing all documents required for managing your network infrastructure such as standard operating procedures and How-To's. ProSight IT Asset Management also offers advanced automation for gathering and associating IT information. Whether you're planning improvements, doing regular maintenance, or reacting to a crisis, ProSight IT Asset Management delivers the information you need when you need it. Read more about ProSight IT Asset Management service.

• Patch Management: Software/Firmware Update Management Services
  Progent's support services for patch management offer businesses of any size a flexible and affordable solution for evaluating, testing, scheduling, applying, and documenting software and firmware updates to your dynamic information network. Besides optimizing the protection and functionality of your IT environment, Progent's software/firmware update management services allow your in-house IT team to concentrate on line-of-business projects and tasks that deliver maximum business value from your information network. Learn more about Progent's software/firmware update management services.

• ProSight Virtual Hosting: Hosted VMs at Progent's Tier III Data Center
  With Progent's ProSight Virtual Hosting service, a small or mid-size business can have its critical servers and apps hosted in a secure Tier III data center on a high-performance virtual machine host configured and managed by Progent's IT support experts. With Progent's ProSight Virtual Hosting service model, the customer owns the data, the OS platforms, and the apps. Since the system is virtualized, it can be moved easily to an alternate hardware solution without a time-consuming and technically risky reinstallation process. With ProSight Virtual Hosting, your business is not tied a single hosting provider. Find out more about ProSight Virtual Hosting services.

• ProSight Active Security Monitoring: Endpoint Protection and Ransomware Defense
  Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) is an endpoint protection (EPP) service that incorporates SentinelOne's cutting edge behavior analysis tools to guard physical and virtual endpoint devices against new malware assaults such as ransomware and file-less exploits, which easily evade legacy signature-matching AV tools. ProSight ASM protects local and cloud-based resources and provides a unified platform to address the entire threat progression including blocking, detection, containment, cleanup, and post-attack forensics. Top capabilities include one-click rollback with Windows VSS and automatic system-wide immunization against new threats. Progent is a SentinelOne Partner, dealer, and integrator. Learn more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) endpoint protection and ransomware recovery.

• ProSight Enhanced Security Protection: Endpoint Security and Microsoft Exchange Filtering
  Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection (ESP) services deliver economical in-depth protection for physical servers and VMs, workstations, mobile devices, and Exchange Server. ProSight ESP utilizes adaptive security and advanced heuristics for round-the-clock monitoring and reacting to cyber assaults from all vectors. ProSight ESP provides two-way firewall protection, intrusion alerts, endpoint management, and web filtering via cutting-edge tools incorporated within one agent accessible from a unified console. Progent's security and virtualization consultants can assist your business to plan and configure a ProSight ESP environment that meets your organization's specific requirements and that allows you demonstrate compliance with legal and industry data security regulations. Progent will help you define and configure security policies that ProSight ESP will manage, and Progent will monitor your IT environment and respond to alarms that call for immediate action. Progent's consultants can also help your company to install and verify a backup and disaster recovery solution like ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) so you can recover rapidly from a potentially disastrous cyber attack like ransomware. Read more about Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection unified physical and virtual endpoint security and Exchange filtering.