Ransomware has been a lucrative business for a long time, generating billions in paid ransom notes for cybercriminals. Now that there's an established business case for ransomware profitability, criminal ventures are looking for ways to make even more money off their investment. And that’s increasingly going to keep organizations in their crosshairs.
What is Ransomware?
Ransomware, which focuses on encrypting files, documents, databases, and any other file type, has become the go-to mechanism for threat actors seeking profit. File recovery becomes next to impossible without a backup or a ransomware decryption tool, and the owner of the crucial files can read little more than a ransom note.
Why do you need anti-ransomware solutions?
Paying the ransom is never advisable, as it encourages further attacks and fuels cybercriminals with the money they need to keep going. Still, in 2020 alone, ransomware gangs made at least $350 million worth of cryptocurrency* in ransom payments. And this only accounts for companies that reported a ransomware incident to authorities and made payments.
*source: Chainanalysis, The 2021 Crypto Crime Report
How does ransomware enter the organization?
Ransomware’s entry points into an organization vary widely, and cybercriminals are extremely creative in exploiting both technological and human vulnerabilities. Often, risky user behavior leads to dangerous clicks on dubious links and ill-considered application/file downloads. The most common ransomware attack vectors are:
How to protect against ransomware?
To prevent ransomware attacks, you must make it difficult for perpetrators to deploy their complex techniques, and you must adopt an anti-ransomware strategy in your organization by:
source: Coveware Q42020 Report
As an adaptive layered security solution, Bitdefender GravityZone provides multiple anti-ransomware capabilities, with all its layers working together for prevention, detection and remediation.
| Bitdefender Unmatched Combination of Ransomware Defenses | |
|---|---|
| Multiple Blocking Layers | Endpoint and network, pre-execution and on-access, file-based and fileless |
| Multiple Detection Layers | Process Inspection, Registry Monitoring, Code Inspection, Hyper Detect |
| Multiple Recovery Layers | Effective rollback from local machine, remote system or security incident |
| Adaptive Defenses | Advanced Anti-Exploit, Adaptive heuristics, tunable machine learning |
| Risk Mitigation Technologies | Automatic vulnerability patching, system misconfigurations, user behavior |
| Tamperproof Backups | No use of vulnerable shadow copies, ransomware can’t delete the backups |
| Remote Ransomware Blocking | Blocks remote and network ransomware attacks and blacklists attacker IPs |
| Enterprise-Wide Cleanup | Kill processes remotely, easy global file quarantine and removal |
Outstanding Security Product 2020
Winner of the AV-Comparatives yearly award for outstanding results across the board including real world protection, performance, malware removal and low false positives.
AV-Comparatives January 2021
Best Protection 2020 Endpoint Security
The AV-TEST Institute is recognizing "Endpoint Security" from Bitdefender with the Best Protection 2020 Award for its superb threat prevention.
AV-Test January 2021
All Bitdefender GravityZone solutions offer protection against ransomware.
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Next-generation endpoint protection and attack forensics platform. Enhanced with user behavior risk analytics and system risk management.
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Unified, highly effective Cloud and MSP Cybersecurity with Risk Analytics, Hardening, Next-Gen AV, EDR and MDR.
ExploreHow Bitdefender technologies can stop ransomware attacks and minimize ransomware damage.
This video offers an overview of ransomware, and covers subjects including the ransomware kill chain and specific Bitdefender prevention and mitigation technologies that allow organizations to harden their defenses against ransomware and roll back the effects of a preliminarily successful ransomware attack.
2020 Business Threat Landscape Report
Like it or not, it looks like ransomware is here to stay. And it keeps adding victims to its list.
If your business fell victim to ransomware, try our free decryption tools to get back your ransomed information for free.
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