Ransomware, which dates back to 1989, is a form of malware that infects and takes control of a computer user’s machine, or secure documents stored on it, to extort money.
Ransomware is a malware format that encrypts the files of a victim. The attacker then demands that the victim be liable for payment to restore data access. Instructions for paying the money to acquire the decryption key are shown to users. Ransomware as a service (RaaS) is a ransomware infrastructure rented out on the dark web to hackers. This is a simple platform to access ransomware attacks and install them on the victim’s machine to acquire the extortion amount.
How do RaaS attacks work?
The majority of ransomware victims fall victim to Social Engineering Attacks. The term ‘social engineering’ refers to a wide variety of malicious activities carried out through human interactions. It uses psychological manipulation to lead users to make security errors or to provide sensitive information. Many individuals and organizations fall prey to these types of attacks.
The real-world consequences of a successful cyberattack were highlighted this month when ransomware shut down one of the United State’s biggest pipelines.
Colonial Pipeline said that after being the victim of a cyberattack, the company was forced to shut down operations and freeze IT systems proactively. The FBI blamed the attack on DarkSide, a cybercriminal gang believed to be based in Eastern Europe, and Colonial reportedly paid a $5 million ransom to the group.
The increased number of cyberattacks and data breaches have roesulted in substantial monetary and non-monetary losses to businesses across industries which is why UnitedLayer® offers automated, robust cybersecurity, compliance, and risk management programs based on the most comprehensive set of frameworks, benchmarks, and guidelines available, boosting confidence in the company’s security compliance posture.
What steps should businesses take for ransomware protection?
Educate your employees: Employees can serve as the first line of defense against online threats, actively helping prevent malware infiltration into the organization’s system. Employee education about warning signals, safe practices, and responses, along with a robust security program, can go a long way toward preventing these attacks.
Employ a data backup and recovery plan for all critical information: Backups are essential for minimizing the effects of malware threats. To access the data in the event of a ransomware attack, store it on a separate device or offline.
Perform a Risk Assessment: A Risk Assessment is a premium and practical way to help protect your organization. Risk assessments help you identify and resolve vulnerabilities in your IT security and privacy. Following a plan based on a risk assessment will significantly reduce your risks, saving you time and money in the long run.
How UnitedLayer® can help
UnitedLayer® offers a variety of security solutions that not only resolve the security concerns outlined in this blog but can also be customized to suit your organization’s specific security needs. Let’s take a look at UnitedLayer’s® portfolio of products and see how they address the security concerns, as well as how they can work together to protect your business better.
Compliance Automation: We provide regular assessments of security vulnerabilities with prescriptive remediations across your entire hybrid infrastructure (cloud, on-premises, and containers). Regular reports/documentation to support compliance with internal security policies to expedite the auditing process. We have the richest library of security frameworks (NIST, DISA, etc.), benchmarks (CIS OS, cloud, and Docker), and compliances (SOC, ISO, GDPR, PCI, HIPAA) with advanced compliance mapping. Co-author of both Docker and Kubernetes Security Benchmarks from the beginning.
Network Security: Our cutting-edge security solutions protect client infrastructure from any external security threats. We provide IPsec VPN, SSL VPN, IDS/IPS services for secured access to cloud infrastructure. In addition to this, we also offer DoS/DDoS protection against all types of network attacks and threats. We have multiple firewalls in place for each customer deployment to increase network security redundancy.
Application Security: Our application security services ensure the safety and security of your sensitive business information from any security threats. With application penetration tests or ethical hacking, we help organizations identify the security vulnerabilities present in the application. Our secure code analysis enables organizations to verify that proper security controls are present in the application.
Virtual Security: We provide security partners like Gateway Firewall, Web Firewall, Application Firewall, DDOS mitigation, VLAN Segmentation, Security Incident Monitoring, Private Cloud implementation with ACL, and lockdown of the ports and IP address along with the encryption of data at rest and in transit.
Data Security: We use several methods to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the data we receive from our customers. Our production data is regularly encrypted and backed up. AES-256 is used to encrypt data at rest, while TLS 1.2 is used to encrypt data in transit.
At UnitedLayer®, we have a growing list of managed services, which helps corporations restructure their infrastructure and enhance their responsiveness, optimization, resource efficiency, and flexibility, leading to better and enhanced customer experience and quicker time to market.
Visit our website and register for a free demo today to get a glimpse into what else we have to offer.
Before the November 3 election, Microsoft Vice President Tom Burt said, “the Russian hackers are employing new tactics, tools, and ways to disguise their role in the attacks.” As the presidential election approaches across the United States of America, voters are concerned about hacking’s high risks.
In September, Microsoft warned that the Russian military intelligence unit that had attacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016 was active again. The company warned that the threats would be advanced and would target consultants, staff members, and other bodies associated with Democratic and Republican campaigns.
According to Reuters’ report, “Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s campaign was specifically targeted by the Russian hackers” via phishing attacks. None of the attacks were successful.
The hackers named in Microsoft’s blog entry are all employing tactics orchestrated to compromise elections directly. Few of the methods are the same as those used in 2016, such as brute force compromises and spear phishing, along with the gathering of people’s log-in credentials and “password spraying,” an attempt to gain access to a plethora of usernames by using common passwords.
Strontium by Microsoft, a Russian hacking group, more widely known as Fancy Bear or APT28, is considered to work out of Russia’s military intelligence agency, GRU. The details of these incidents recall the hacking and information warfare carried out in favor of Trump against former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.
Fancy Bear has been dependant on spear phishing, a hacking tactic that tricks a targeted individual into sharing critical passwords.
This time, the group is taking a disparate approach with password-spraying and brute-force attacks, a shift in tactics that allows for both larger-scale attacks and greater anonymity for the attackers. Microsoft has also spotted hackers in China and Iran, targeting people involved in Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s presidential campaigns. Given Russia’s track record, experts say Moscow is the adversary that worries them the most.
To secure the 2020 U.S. presidential election’s integrity, the private sector has offered to support this fretful situation. In February, Fulton, Wisconsin, was the first town to implement new software from Microsoft called ElectionGuard, ensuring that their votes are being validly recorded. Facebook also pledged to combat disinformation by blocking all new political advertisements on its platform in the leading week to Election Day. After the election, the company intends to redirect users to accurate election results so that neither candidate can prematurely claim victory.
Data is one of the biggest assets a firm has. With the growth of the data economy, companies find immense value in data processing, sharing, and consumption. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have all created empires on the economy of data. Transparency in how businesses are requesting consent, adhering to their privacy policies, and managing the data they have collected is vital to building trust and accountability with clients and partners who expect privacy. Many companies have learned the value of privacy the hard way through failures in widely publicized data.
Protection of data and IT infrastructure has always been a big concern for all companies, and now with IT systems shifting to cloud networks, it has become at the forefront of all IT agendas. Safety technologies have also been a core component of Data Center design and construction. Owners of Data Centers have worked tirelessly to maintain the highest security degree and have scrupulously followed industry best safety practices and met all regulatory requirements. Yet data centers are complex environments, and protecting them demands that each component’s security requirements be treated separately yet adopt a central, comprehensive security strategy at the same time.
Data privacy management helps make data discovery, classification, mapping, and risk analysis transparent to personal and sensitive data across the company. It also allows organizations to determine and consistently track compliance with data privacy with multifactor risk scoring and data access and movement tracking.
UnitedLayer® helps you comply with data sovereignty and data protection laws applicable to your business in any global market. You’ll also get additional 24x7x365 threat detection, analysis, and analytics when paired with our data privacy solutions. It also enables you to determine the risk, build custom policies for encrypting and restricting access to sensitive PII data, and report access to data. We use CCTV to track the facilities and conduct strict ID checks to access the hall of data.
UnitedLayer® provides you with complete data access and lets you decide when and how your data is handled. We maintain limited knowledge of the data processed by each customer via the hosting infrastructure, and we only process your data according to your instructions. When you wish to move your data beyond the EU and the EEA, we provide an acceptable degree of assured protection for your data. In other countries, like Amsterdam, we have data centers that provide our customers with additional options for an EU footprint.
The solutions concentrate on bringing the cloud’s power to your data center, allowing you to meet data sovereignty requirements more efficiently and enhance your efficiency by finding cloud services closer to you. We make sure your data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Our solutions ensure your data is subject to the country’s laws and governance systems. We ensure a simpler and more efficient migration route by which you can leverage your current application ecosystem. Our solutions are compatible with HIPPA, PCI, DISA, and SOC.
For so many variables to consider, finding the right data center might sound overwhelming, but the bottom line is that your data matters, and you should make sure you place it in the safest hands possible. Following these best practices will help you get the most accurate details on how a data center works to inform better your network protecting choices.
To get a better insight into what else UnitedLayer® has got in store, sign up for a free demo today.
The advent of cloud computing turned digital economics around, optimizing, enhancing, and building a strong foundation for enterprise applications. Software as a Service routes all of the enterprise data inbound and outbound email and web traffic through a provider’s network of high-performance data centers. The responsibility of the provider is then to scan, test, and then, quarantine, or forward the traffic using the infrastructure that few businesses can afford on their own. Multi-Layer Security makes sense for enterprise cloud solution providers, for one primary reason, which is cost. Cloud providers can distribute the costs of infrastructure, bandwidth, and expertise across clients.
Cybersecurity is a major concern for enterprises dealing with cloud resources. Cloud technology has received a significant boost by application-wide technological upgrades, silicon, and edge cloud. Gartner Analysts have studied the effects of the COVID 19 pandemic and the revolution it is bringing about in the business world. From accelerated digitalization of business processes, endpoint mobility, and expansion of cloud computing in several organizations. It has revealed legacy thinking and technologies adopted by enterprises. Security is no longer just a part of compliance and legal requirements, it is now an increasingly influential, defined discipline of its own that impacts almost all aspects of an organization. The point of contention is then to assess how to go about bringing this assimilation.
What is a Multi-Layer Security System?
A multi-layer security system is one that is implemented across multiple operational layers, using several layers of security provisions to shield components at every level. It provides a certain defensive depth that can be used to mitigate threats, delay, or prevent threats overall. So, why is multi-layer security the right way to protect and shield enterprise applications?
The fact is that the current web environment encourages and rewards blended attacks, that is multi-pronged threats against their targets, most of which have heavy financial implications. The only chance of stopping these multi-pronged attacks is to ensure that enterprises set up efficient and coordinated defenses that work across multiple protocols and applications. Layered security strategies are the only way to combat the current cyber threat landscape effectively. Rather than merely waiting for attacks to hit endpoints, layered Security takes a holistic view of cyber defense, accounting for the multitude of vectors by which modern malware is delivered and recognizing the importance of network and end user-level Security.
Criminals are efficient in their approach to blended attacks, in order to get their malicious software installed and persistent on business computers, they take steps such as mixing and matching adware, spyware, viruses, and any other information that they can scrape from social networks, and so on. Enterprises cannot block blended attacks by blocking every channel used by attackers without sealing off their business from the outside world.
UnitedLayer’s® Security as a Service, a security management solution enables you to proactively identify, respond, and mitigate any security threats against your IT infrastructure. Our cutting-edge security solutions protect client infrastructure from any external security threats. We provide IPsec VPN, SSL VPN, IDS/IPS services for secured access to cloud infrastructure along with DoS/DDoS protection against all types of network attacks and threats. With application penetration tests or ethical hacking, we help organizations identify the security vulnerabilities present in the application. Our secure code analysis enables organizations to verify that proper security controls are present in the application.
It’s essential to find an enterprise cloud provider who can offer the transparency to let businesses evaluate their protection, and the accountability to stand behind their promises and claims. Multi-layer Security not only makes sense in the cloud but is the need of the hour.
Visit the UnitedLayer® website to know more about multi-layer security and how to protect your cloud resources effectively.
