Ransomware As A Service (RaaS) Explained

Ransomware As A Service (RaaS) Explained

What is Ransomware?

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.

Disaster Recovery Solutions for Cloud

Disaster Recovery Solutions for Cloud

The most important asset that businesses own is data. Data is the backbone of every department and is integral to the day to day functioning of organizations. Financials, SCM, HR, and CRM are all integral functions that generate data to optimize the operational capabilities of the organization, improve the planning and allocation of resources. Most organizations store their data on the cloud or data centers on-premises to ensure that it is securely managed by data experts. Moving data to the cloud is an efficient technological solution that improves the data management capabilities of enterprises.  

Traditional cloud disaster recovery backs up data from applications to alternate data centers. According to a study done by the University of Texas, “94% of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss do not survive – 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years.” Failure in any part of business processes can translate to a significant loss of productivity, revenue, reputation, and in some cases, customers. Cloud Disaster recovery has an edge over traditional disaster recovery as organizations do not need to build a secondary physical site and buy additional hardware and software to support critical operations. Depending on current business demands, cloud computing resources can be easily scaled up or down as required. Disaster recovery in cloud computing can be performed easily by migrating copies of data to the cloud. Backed up data can be stored across multiple geographical locations, which eliminates a single point of failure, essentially a backup copy is present even if one of the data centers fails. 

Disaster Recovery methods can be customized for backups to be active as required. For example, an active-active offering hosts a hot site, which mirrors the processes and systems. The load is synchronously shared between the system and the site, which means that when disasters occur the backup is instantly available. An active-passive setup offers a warm site, which basically ensures that core processes are constantly backed up and available instantly when a disaster occurs but the site may experience some delay. This is a lower-cost option suitable for secondary processes. Applications that are not mission-critical and need not be recovered instantly can be stored in a cold site in an active-replicated setup. This is the most budget-friendly setup which can be used to store data that may not be accessed often but recovery times will take longer. 

It is difficult to predict when failures can occur and how serious its impact will be. However, planning disaster response can help enterprises successfully recover from the potentially disastrous consequences. When disasters occur, DR ensures that the affected data, applications, and other resources are stored in the cloud so that enterprises can resume operations normally without any loss of data or performance. 

Disaster recovery is essential to Business Continuity planning. Business Continuity refers to the technological contingencies put in place to ensure that business operations can resume without delay and difficulty following any incident that could disrupt business. Disaster recovery plays a pivotal role as there could be a disruption in services due to floods, earthquakes, or cyberattacks. Organizations must analyze cases that would pose a  potential risk in order to formulate a mitigation plan.

Changing times have brought about new threats and possibilities of unforeseen breakdowns of the technological infrastructure of enterprises. In the current fast-evolving technological landscape there is a significant increase in security issues such as cyberattacks. There will always be uncertainty as to which events can potentially damage data storage and hamper the activities of enterprises and when these could potentially occur. With new technological solutions supporting data functionalities in enterprises, Disaster Recovery systems are essential to efficiently manage data.

UnitedLayer’s® Hybrid Cloud Disaster Recovery solution enables enterprises to be resilient, respond to critical situations faster, and recovers their data from all the sources. Operate on your business-critical data requirements without any interruptions or unscheduled downtimes. Our DR solutions are highly customizable, with solutions for business continuity with sub-one-minute time where customers can build specific Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) according to their business requirements.

UnitedLayer Disaster Recovery

Overall Recovery Goals

UnitedLayer’s® state-of-the-art network infrastructure ensures that any issues or errors can be quickly identified and taken care of by the expert support and managed DR services that we offer. Moreover, 24*7*365 support and maintenance are provided to data stored on the UnitedLayer® infrastructure, including hardware and software upgrades. On-demand scalability enables you to add additional resources to meet the increased replication needs, this helps in reducing cost and improve business flexibility. UnitedLayer’s® DR solutions are highly secure and compliant to all the industry-leading compliance standards like HIPAA and PCI.

Sign up today for a free demonstration and explore the services and features offered by UnitedLayer®.

 

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