Top 3 of the Most Important FBI Ransomware Recommendations

The FBI recently issued a series of recommendations intended to boost protection of your environment.

They are meant to help defend against multiple types of malware and other attacks, and if used correctly, they will also protect against ransomware.

Applications whitelisting

This solution prevents the ability for any ransomware to operate since no ransomware is trusted. It ensures that only known applications designated as trusted can run on any endpoint. The biggest challenge to the success of whitelisting is in creating the initial list of trusted applications, and keeping that list accurate, complete, and current.

Ivanti solutions offer many options for comprehensive, flexible, effective, straightforward whitelisting. And Ivanti makes it easy to create and maintain your whitelists.

For example, the Ivanti solution will automatically “discover” all applications running on “clean” systems and will validate application integrity against its own application reputation database. Adding rules to trust applications based on their owners (authorized admins) and vendors further reduces the amount of configuration required to create those trusted application lists.

Isolated environments

In most cases, ransomware is distributed as an email attachment. Restricting users to virtualized or containerized environments will ensure that any ransomware that gains access to a user’s system will do no harm to the user’s primary work environment.

Backup

The FBI recommend using timely, frequent backups of critical files as a business continuity consideration. If done right, backups will save the day if you’re attacked by ransomware.

However, you won’t need to rely on backups alone to combat ransomware if you implement the defenses recommended in our free white paper.