Every week I see more news about organizations that have fallen prey to ransomware attacks. It just illustrates the fact the ransomware is a lucrative tool for cybercriminals and is therefore going to be plaguing us for the foreseeable future. To be proactive in protecting your organization from this threat, you should ensure that you are following the latest best practices guidance available. So, in this paper I’m going to summarize the best practices recommendations found in the #StopRansomware Guide published by the CISA.

Ensure you have complete knowledge of all of your IT assets, and that you manage them securely.

• You should maintain comprehensive inventories of all hardware, software, firmware, operating systems and data on your systems.
• You should know where all of these IT assets are located at all times, including data.
• You should know the relative value of these assets to your organization and protect them accordingly. This means conducting business impact analyses.
• You should map trust relationships among systems, and you should also map how data flows into and out of these systems. These maps and diagrams should be comprehensive in scope, well protected and stored in multiple locations and forms.

Ensure that the principle of least privilege is strictly applied across your organization. This means that all users should have access to only those IT assets that are necessary to perform their job functions. Those with high-level access to systems such as system administrators should employ very strong access controls and should be highly monitored.

If you use virtual systems, you should ensure that all hypervisors and associated IT infrastructure, including network and storage components, are updated and hardened to the latest best practices recommendations.

Ensure security settings are enabled and applied in cloud environments. Ensure you understand which security responsibilities are yours and which security responsibilities belong to the service provider.

Ensure you have a firm grip on remote access and remote monitoring and management software used on your systems. These mechanisms must be highly monitored and restricted. Ensure secure configuration of these mechanisms is maintained.

Ensure that your network is properly segmented. Separation should be maintained between operational technology and IT. Business units and IT assets should be placed in network segments according to business need.

Ensure that the usage of PowerShell is restricted to specific users on a case-by-case basis by using Group Policy. Typically, only users or administrators who manage a network or Windows OS are permitted to use PowerShell.

Ensure that domain controllers are properly secured to help prevent the spread of ransomware network wide. Ensure that domain controllers receive prompt security maintenance and are include in vulnerability and penetration testing. Harden controllers to only include a minimum of software or agents needed for business purposes.

Ensure that logging from network devices, local hosts and cloud services is verbose, and that these logs are securely stored.

Establish a security baseline of normal network traffic and tune network appliances to detect anomalous behavior.

Ensure that you are conducting security testing, such as vulnerability and penetration studies, of networks and software applications.

Enable tracking prevention to limit the vectors that ad networks and trackers can use to track user information.

Enable website typo protection to limit the possibility of logging onto spoofed websites or other potentially malicious links that could compromise a browser.

Enable browser-based anti-virus for active scanning while browsing as an added layer of defense.

Block website notifications by default to limit a website’s ability to track user data that can be exploited.

Employing all of these best practices recommendations, and monitoring security and government websites for additions and updates to these best practices, will help your organization prevent ransomware attacks, and will also help you deal with them effectively if they occur.

This is a new world since I first began in the information security business. In the early 1980s, information security had little to do with the vulnerability of the computers themselves – this is before personal computers, Windows-type operating systems and the Internet. Mainframes were a tough nut to crack, and the possibility of compromise was pretty much an internal threat. What information security focused on then was signals and physical security. How to keep your information from being lifted from hard wires, documents and radio signals? The answer was cryptographic techniques and security policies actually developed during WWII and the Cold War. These same methods were then, unfortunately, applied to networked computer systems constructed from personal computer technology and operating systems, across a different medium than those used before: the Internet protocols. This is a recipe for information security disaster! Functionality, not security, was the overwhelming focus of these original protocols and operating systems, and applying security methods after the fact was like applying a Band-Aid to a torn artery.

When hacking and later cyber-crime problems first started appearing in the mid-90s, the business world and the general public didn’t take the problem too seriously at all. Having to use passwords and other simple security measures was viewed as a pain in the keester by almost all of us at that time. But little by little, privacy and security breaches started getting more and more serious and damaging; people began to pay more attention to cybercrime and businesses began to become a little more open to increasing their information security budgets. Network perimeter security controls became stronger, and we started paying more attention to internal security controls. But by this time cybercrime was firmly in the hands of professional, financially and politically motivated cybercriminals. This highly motivated group started finding new and novel ways to overcome or circumvent information security controls, applications and services. Every time new and more restrictive security methods were put in place, some new attack method to overcome the latest and greatest soon followed. This, alas, is where we stand today.

The fight continues, and the good guys are making great strides, both in security methods and in public and business willingness to participate in information security. The CIS Critical Security Controls and all the new AI-driven security applications are examples of this willingness. But I have noticed something disturbing happening here of late. The security measures being employed by businesses are getting so good, that people are starting to trust in their effectiveness too much; complacency is rearing its ugly head! And since the very idea of security began thousands of years ago, complacency has proved itself to be a fatal error. No matter what, you can count on security controls to be overcome one way or another. So far, this has never failed to occur in the history of mankind.

It therefore behooves all of us, especially those of us tasked with the privacy and security of information, to be constantly vigilant and even more forward thinking than the attackers that would steel our information and privacy. It must constantly be kept in mind that the attacker always has an advantage over the defender: the defender must get it right every single time, the attacker only must get it right once.

From the time an information security incident is first suspected at your organization until the end of the last “lessons learned” meeting, good communications are absolutely vital. Communications must rapidly and surely reach all interested parties in the proper order, but at the same time, they must be secure, authorized and only available to those with an immediate need to know. If your organization does not have a well thought out and practiced IR communications plan in place, you will not be able to reach these goals. And that could cost your organization both reputational damage and funds.

To build an IR communications plan, you need to consider all the various individuals and groups that are potentially going to play a part in the incident response. For example, all employees need to know how and who to communicate with if they notice a security problem. Help desk, supervisory and IT personnel also need to know how and who to communicate with if a security problem comes to their attention. And especially, IR team members need to know how, when and who to communicate with, not only among themselves and other members of the organization, but also with outside parties such as law enforcement, regulators and the media.

But the “who,” is only one step in the process. The other steps are the “what,” “how” and “when” to communicate parts of the puzzle. These tasks are easy on an individual basis, but quickly become complex. IR team members should meet and discuss these issues and make sure to document their decisions on how to handle them. Fortunately, the team will not have come up with all of this on their own. There is plenty of advice available on the Internet from private and government organizations that is available to all. I also recommend contacting similar organizations and user groups to see what advice they can give you from their own experiences with handling communications during an incident.

Here is some advice on IR communications that has proven beneficial to the organizations that we have worked with in the past:

• Some one person (usually the head of the IR team) should be in charge of communications during an incident response. This individual should be aware of and approve all important communications during the incident response.
• Ensure that there are multiple means of communication available. Phones, email, Slack channels, web-based communications, etc. can all be utilized.
• Ensure that all communications are secure and only available to their intended audience. A lack of proper secrecy during an incident response can be disastrous.
• Create communications templates of all kinds for use during the incident response, such as communications to be released to the media, to employees, to customers, to service providers, to regulators, etc. Having such templates saves a lot of time and effort among personnel whose attention could be better directed elsewhere. It can also help ensure that mistakes are not made on what is being communicated.
• Practice how communications will be handled during incident response exercises such as table tops. These exercises expose many gaps in IR communications techniques that you don’t want to discover during an actual incident.
• Ensure that all individuals and groups that may be involved in an incident response are made aware of how and who to communicate with during an incident. Documented communications policies and procedures should be included in information security training, policy documents, service agreements, contracts, etc.

Currently, when people think of social engineering attacks, they immediately think of email phishing. This is because for years now email phishing has been the preferred attack method employed by attackers to gain access to user computers and hence into private internal computer networks. But we all should remember that email phishing is only one type of social engineering attack method; there are many. Social engineering can also include such vectors as snail-mail spoofing, removeable media spoofing, SMS spoofing, blackmail, intimidation, in-person impersonation …and phone impersonation, which brings us to the subject of this blog: voice cloning.

Years ago, I wrote a blog about the dangers posed by digital recording of images and sound; about the fact that perfect fake digital recordings could be generated at will given the proper amount of computing power and expertise. How could we then fully trust security cameras and voice recordings to reflect reality? The answer was and is we can’t.

Now, thanks to AI technology, we have convincing fake voices being generated in real time! One little sample of a person’s speech and, like a parrot, the computer is immediately able to impersonate the voice. The implications of this technology are staggering to the world of information security management, especially when one considers the next stage in this technology which is to perfectly replicate both the voice and the moving images of a person in real time.

We haven’t been able to trust that users who sign into a network or service are really who they purport to be since networks began, but now we can’t even trust a phone call from somebody whose voice we know very well. This capability has not escaped the notice of cybercriminals. They are already using voice cloning to convince people to reveal private information or to allow them access to private systems with great success.

So how are we supposed to respond to this new threat? First, I would be sure to make personnel aware of the threat. Include voice cloning in your regular information security and awareness training mechanisms. Put up a warning on your security Slack channel and on posters, and include voice impersonation in your phishing training modules. Develop procedures for addressing the dangers of voice cloning and write them into policy. You can also use AI to battle AI. Employ AI-based software that can monitor audio to identify digital noise, signs of repetition or artifacts that are not present in a live voice. The worst thing you can do is ignore this threat and do nothing, so why not be proactive and get ahead of the threat now?

Policies are simply rules that say “this is the way we are going to do things.” If you want your organization to operate in a unified and coherent manner, you must have policies in place and you must ensure that everyone in the organization knows and complies with those policies that pertain to them. This all sounds obvious and simple, but trying to implement such a system quickly becomes complex and confusing.

In the specific case of information security policy, many organizations that have been in existence for years find themselves in the unenviable position of having to formulate a body of information security policies after the fact. This is a daunting task indeed, and needs to be approached in a logical and systematic manner.

The first step in this process is to assemble an inventory of all the information assets and processes that need to be protected. All critical information, software assets, hardware devices, personnel and service providers need to be included in this inventory. A list of critical business functions that employ these assets also needs to be made. Once these tasks are accomplished, policies need to be formed and documented that address the proper use and management of each of these functions and assets. These policies need to meet the goals of the organization and any laws and regulations that apply to them.

The next step in the process is to formulate and document procedures for implementing the policies of the organization. These procedures should be sufficiently detailed to show untrained personnel to how to perform them. Finally, all of these policies and procedures need to be reviewed and adapted regularly to ensure that they remain adequate to meet the goals of the organization.

As must be readily apparent, the final result is going to be a mountain of documentation that, despite its complexity, must be readily accessible and comprehensible to all that are governed by it. This quandary is where most organizations seem to fail. Many bodies of policy and procedure I have encountered have been hard to navigate, disorganized, redundant and sometimes even self-contradictory. This causes confusion and frustration among users and thus renders the hard work put into the process largely ineffective.

To remedy this as much as possible, organizations should take that extra step and expend the manhours and resources necessary to make their written information security program usable. Policies should be organized into logical categories such as access and identity management, vendor management, security incident response, etc. This allows users to narrow the field when they are looking for specific policies. Polices should also be kept in a central repository under the responsibility of specific individuals or groups within the organization. Policies should be backed up in multiple locations and forms for business continuity purposes. Access to specific parts of the repository should be easy for authorized users, yet should be based on need to know to maintain the security of private information and processes. Policies should be very well indexed and should contain tables of content. In addition, authors of policy should always be searching for ways to remove unnecessary redundancy from policies and to make the language in them unambiguous, direct and terse. Finally, every user should receive training in all the organization policies that apply to them, how to find them and how to apply them. Performing all of these tasks will help ensure that your organizational policies are of actual use and are not just ornaments to be dangled in front of regulators and prospective customers.

Despite all our network security efforts, attackers continue to compromise our private data and systems at an alarming rate. What’s worse, they do this using the same chain of steps. They find some way to get access to the internal network, they find a way to navigate around the network, they elevate their privileges and, voila! They can toy with your data and systems to the level of their expertise and rapaciousness.

The thing is, if we can break any one of these steps, we can most often keep the attackers from reaching their goals. And one of the most useful and available tools out there to help organizations disrupt the chain is multi-factor authentication (MFA). MFA can be very effective in preventing initial access to the network, it can also be very effective in preventing elevation of privileges and, therefore, can help prevent attackers navigating around the network. Because of this, we at MicroSolved plead with all of our customers and readers to employ MFA to the fullest possible extent.

Certainly, users should be required to employ MFA when accessing the network remotely. This is necessary to prevent attackers who have accessed users’ credentials from getting that initial foothold on the network. I personally advocate using MFA for any network or AD access.

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) V8 Security Controls also require employing MFA for all externally-exposed enterprise or third-party applications wherever supported. They also state that enforcing MFA for this purpose can be accomplished safely through the use of a directory service or SSO provider.

CIS V8 controls also require the use of MFA for administrative access. This also needs to be accompanied by requiring that all network administration be accomplished using dedicated administrator accounts. Administrators should use separate access accounts for all other network activities. These controls help tremendously in preventing attackers from elevating their privileges by simply gaining access to a normal user account.

In these dangerous times, all organizations should at least employ MFA as described above. When combined with encryption of sensitive data across your network and backups, these controls pose a formidable obstacle for attackers to overcome.