Protecting your organization against ransomware like WannaCrypt
Hopefully, this information is obvious at this point if you have been following current affairs. Malware like WannaCrypt will continue to evolve as protections evolve to mitigate risk. It is a vicious cycle. Ransomware like this can easily put a company out of business depending on the scale of the compromise.
The major news came from the number of unpatched server and PC Operating Systems, while the catalyst for the ransomware attack was not a phish - it very well could have been. Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection is an extremely valuable and inexpensive safeguard. Advanced Threat Protection is the best way to protect your organization against zero-day threats including malicious email attachments and URLs. This service is continually evolving and adding additional capabilities. It's machine learning capability augments the built-in Exchange Online Protection against known threats and epitomizes the concept of defense in depth. When Advanced Threat Protection detects threats, it updates Exchange Online Protection to provide another layer of defense and all Office 365 customers benefit.
While keeping your systems security patches up-to-date and refreshing your operating systems can help prevent some intrusions and infections, adding Advanced Threat Protection to your Office 365 tenant and protecting your email is inexpensive and easy to implement. This may very well be the most important security feature in Office 365 and can easily pay for itself by preventing malware like WannaCrypt.
For technical details about WannaCrypt, see WannaCrypt ransomware worm targets out-of-date systems.
Protect your organization against WannaCrypt and its variants:
- Keep up to date on security updates (apply MS17-010 if not already done (March patch release),
- Update Windows Defender (updated 12 May 2017)
- If not using SMBv1 disable it: How to enable and disable SMBv1, SMBv2, and SMBv3 in Windows and Windows Server
- Also see How to respond to Ransomware
Activating Advanced Threat Protection can improve your Office 365 Security Score. Do you know your Secure Score? Enabling Technologies provides Office 365 security assessments to help protect you in the cloud.
Please visit http://enablingtechcorp.com/Solutions/Secureit!.aspx for more information.
