You can secure your organization from risks of ransomware and recovery with a robust, fool-proof and tested plan. However, designing a ransomware incident response plan can be a daunting task, especially if you’re not sure where to start. These are 5 steps with key pointers and best practices for creating an effective ransomware response plan that is tailored to your organization’s specific needs.
1. Assess Risks | Validate Attack
Before you can begin building your ransomware response plan, you first need toassess your organization’s risks and vulnerabilities. Conduct a thorough risk assessment and threat analysis. This includes understanding the types of ransomware attacks that are most likely to occur, as well as identifying which systems and data are most at risk.
Validate that an attack is actually happening. There are a variety of malware – phishing, adware, or other malware infections that exhibit ransomware-like symptoms, such as strange file extensions, unusual emails or files, or system slowdowns. Proceed to the next steps if the two telling signs of ransomware are verified – your files are encrypted or locked.
2. Mitigate Risks | Contain Attack
Once you have assessed your organization’s risks and vulnerabilities, it’s time to start mitigating them. This may include implementing additional security measures, such as firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS), and anti-virus software. It’s also important to make sure that your employees are properly trained in how to identify and respond to ransomware attacks.
If you determine that an attack is in progress, it’s important to take steps to contain it. This may involve isolating infected systems, disabling network access from affected systems, quarantining infected files, and contacting law enforcement for assistance.
3. Respond to Attack | Recover Data
Once you have contained the ransomware attack, it’s time to start responding to it. This may include restoring systems and data from backup, removing ransomware infections, or contacting law enforcement. It’s important to have a well-defined Incident Response Plan (IRP) or a Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plan (BCDR) in place so that you can respond quickly and effectively to a ransomware attack. CIOs, CSOs, and IT managers outline processes that help their organization prepare for and recover from disruptive events.
Once you have contained and responded to the ransomware attack, your next priority will be to restore systems and data as quickly as possible. Depending on the scope of the attack, this may involve restoring data from backup and/or reinstalling affected systems from scratch. If you have followed the 3-2-1 best practice of backups, then your backup should be unaffected – on the cloud or offsite – such that you can restore the “last known good version”. It’s important to work closely with IT staff during this process to make sure that any necessary security patches or updates are applied before bringing affected systems back online.
4. Train Employees | Communicate and Coordinate
Turn your weakest link to your strongest with comprehensive, contextual, and regular cybersecurity training. Also, remember to keen it contextual by building governance into your systems such that alerts and red flag checks appear at pertinent times. For instance, on sharing files or folders advise employees to provide minimal access on a strict need-to-know basis.
As part of your ransomware response plan, it is important to outline clear communication and coordination with all relevant stakeholders throughout the incident response process. This includes working closely with IT teams, security personnel, legal teams, and other key stakeholders both within and outside your organization.
5. Retrospect and Improvise
Effective ransomware incident response requires coordination between multiple teams and individuals, both inside and outside your organization. Make sure that everyone involved in the response understands their roles and responsibilities, and that there is a clear chain of command so that decisions can be made quickly and effectively.
Once the ransomware attack has been contained and dealt with, it is important to take a step back and retrospectively analyze what happened. Performing a post-mortem analysis of a ransomware attack can help your organization learn from its mistakes and improve its defenses against future attacks.
Finally, it is important to continually monitor for new threats and risks related.
You can read more about Ransomware Incident Response Plan here.
Nexlogica has the cybersecurity experts to support your organization. We are always happy to hear from you.
Box is a cloud-based software package that allows for automated syncing of files and folders. Box users can use the software to collaborate on projects and file creation, too.
For a company already using the Box cloud storage and collaboration software on laptops and desktops, adding the mobile Box app is a logical next step. Team members can enhance their productivity by using Box anywhere and on any device. No matter where work (or life) takes you, Box Mobile app helps you manage your content and get more done. With flexibility to view hundreds of file types, securely share your files, and save them for offline access, the Box app puts the power of the Content Cloud in your hands.
The number of features users will have available with the mobile apps depends in part on the subscription tier for the account.
When purchasing a Box subscription for a business, users can select among four different pricing tiers. Each of these four tiers includes mobile access as part of the regular price. Each level also offers a 14-day free trial period. However, the version of Box made for non-business use does have a completely free version available.
Users will have access to the same folder structure they use in the desktop version. When users open the Box app, they will see all of the folders used to organize the files stored in the cloud.
Users who sign up for the Business, Business Plan, or Enterprise tiers will have access to Box’s mobile security controls feature. This feature gives administrators the ability to control how team members access the data stored in Box through their mobile devices. Administrators can manage these mobile security settings through the Admin Console page in Box. Individual mobile users also have some options for controlling their mobile security settings, including the ability to require a Box app-specific passcode after a period of inactivity. Users can choose to enact a two-step login process to Box as well.
Box Mobile App is available via iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry devices. This app gives users the ability to make use of Box – capture, access, and share content securely – on any device, anywhere.
A process of implementation involves a variety of different departments and stakeholders. The key to a successful ECM implementation lies in the combination of planning and partnership.
Here are five steps you can take to ensure a smooth ECM implementation.
1. Enlist a team of stakeholders
The success of your ECM program depends only minimally on the technology you choose. A much more important consideration is around your stakeholders – the people and leaders of teams who will use or benefit from the ECM system. You should examine how they feel about the project and whether the ECM system it produces meets their needs.
Input from your stakeholders will help you to understand how an ECM system affects different departments of the business. This understanding will improve your chances of success.
2. Define your ECM goals
You should define the goals of your ECM project with your stakeholder team. Goals will depend on your situation, but some common ECM goals are as follows:
Improve information security.
Support compliance.
Reduce friction in the business.
Implement content tagging.
Integrate automation and AI.
3. Plan for your goals
Once you know what your goals are, you should plan how to reach them. This could be through refinements of the current system or by building a new system. This may require you to consider content migration and user training and adoption.
For each goal, it’s important to balance time-to-market with its effects on the business. Determine whether there are important things you can complete faster than others. During this step is the time to optimize your implementation timeline.
4. Build, test and deploy your ECM
Use the agile/scrum methodology to drive your implementation project and CI/CD to maximize stakeholder engagement and program flexibility. Iterate in bi-weekly or monthly releases that stakeholders will evaluate.
By moving incrementally toward the goals, you will provide opportunities for learning and course correction as the program progresses.
5. Iterate
Despite completing a successful implementation, the work is not over. An ECM must adapt to new realities if it will remain viable and valuable to an organization. You should include in your plan the capability to build, integrate and refine your ECM to deliver future business value.
Power BI is a business analytics tool from Microsoft that helps build various dashboards and reports and can quickly deal with millions of rows of data. In contrast, Excel is also a tool from Microsoft with various built-in tools and functions that we can use for mathematical calculations, iterations, forecasting, and creating graphs and charts.
Key Differences
Data Size: One of the key differences is handling the capacity of data quantity. With Power BI, we can handle millions of rows together with fast speed, but with Excel, it is annoying to handle large amounts of data.
Cloud-Based Features: Once the dashboard building completes in Power BI, we can publish the report to the end-users with Microsoft’s cloud-based services. But, when it comes to Excel, we need to share the large data with the dashboard via email or any online sharing tool.
Visualizations: In Power BI, we have plenty of visualizations to design the dashboard, but with excel, we have only limited visualizations.
Custom Visualizations: Power BI allows us to import visualizations that are not there in the file by going to the marketplace, but Excel does not have that luxury.
Item
Power BI
Excel
Availability
Recent product, so you cannot see this with all Excel users.
Commonly known and available to most people.
Learning
Requires considerable knowledge of Power Query and Power Pivot DAX formulas and techniques to use it.
Universal language spoken in almost all the offices worldwide. Most users find it easy to learn.
Cost to Acquire
Free to download and use for personal use, but it takes $10 per month per user to share reports with others.
Free
Working Flexibility
Not flexible, especially if it just shifted from Excel to Power BI. You cannot do everything, everywhere.
Flexible to use and create summary reports in simple steps and formulas.
Visuals
Wide variety of visualizations.
Only a few built-in charts.
Chart Customization
Possibility work with only one chart.
Possibility to create another set of charts only using built-in charts.
Dashboard Interactivity
Power BI not only has slicers but also has a wide variety of other slicers. Cross filters, visual level filters, report level filters, and drillthrough filters.
Excel has slicers to make the dashboards interactive with the user.
Size of the Data
Can handle large amounts of data with the Power Pivot engine model.
Struggles to handle a large amount of data and often says “Not Responding” error with a large quantity of data.
Accessibility
Cannot be accessible everywhere unless you have licensed software.
Access from everywhere.
Formula Language
DAX language for its formulas and functions.
MDX language for its formulas and functions.
Data Security
Possibility to restrict the data view to individuals by setting rules.
When you share the dashboard with external stakeholders, you need to share it with data, which does not guarantee data security.
Data Source
Can get data from everywhere with Power Query.
Can get data from everywhere with Power Query.
Power BI and Excel have many similarities in terms of functionalities and how the data is presented or how we make the connection with the other data sources. Excel is much easier to use than Power BI, but Power BI has a certain upper hand, like better visualization. We should also remember that Excel is very limited to sharing reports which Power BI overcomes.
You can read more about Power BI vs Excel – Differences here.
Nexlogica has the expert resources to support all your technology initiatives. We are always happy to hear from you.
BOX announced new innovations in the Content Cloud that empower teams to work securely together from anywhere, on any type of file, in any application — all while delivering better, faster results and great experiences. With Box, opportunities are truly limitless.
Collaboration and workflow updates include:
Box Canvas for interactive visual collaboration and whiteboarding.
With Box Canvas, hybrid and remote teams can truly connect and collaborate in new ways that go beyond traditional communication styles. So whether you’re building out a new process or conducting a workshop, Canvas gives you infinite space to bring processes to life and provides all the shapes, sticky notes, connectors, and more that you need to:
Brainstorm and share ideas
Solve problems, strategize, and analyze
Create high-level design diagrams, plan projects, and even teach new concepts
The all-new Box Notes for secure, real-time collaboration from anywhere.
Box Notes give users a secure, real-time experience for quick and seamless content collaboration. Notes can also help teams tackle more extensive documentation, project management, and development-type tasks.
Content Insights for visual analytics that show the impact of your content.
Content Insights will allow users to see how your content gets consumed, how often, how much, and on which days. Given the exploding amount of digital content being shared and distributed, this type of visibility is critical.
Box Sign capabilities and integrations to address more e-sign use cases.
Box Sign e-signature capabilities is added to Individual (free) and Personal Pro accounts, so every one of the customers can take advantage of native e-signatures.
In frictionless security and compliance, Box has added:
Zero trust security features for more granular and flexible controls
Ethical walls as an information barrier between different user groups
Malware deep scan enhancements
Stronger protection against ransomware
More flexibility to Box Governance retention policies
New US public sector certifications for cybersecurity
And when it comes to the tech stack:
Enhancements to integrations across Salesforce and Slack
Updates to Box for Microsoft integrations
Rich insights in the Admin Console for increased transparency and visibility
