Sign up to the NCSC
Early Warning Service
This is free and uses a range of information feeds to notify organisations of cyber incidents, malicious activity and web-based vulnerabilities on your public facing domains and IP ranges. It ensures that NCSC can contact organisations quickly in case of an incident. You can sign up here.
Read this guidance on mitigating malware and ransomware
The NCSC urges all organisations to follow its guidance on mitigating malware and ransomware. It details a number of steps organisations can take to disrupt ransomware attack vectors and enable effective recovery from ransomware attacks. This may be a significant undertaking, so we have listed some quick, initial steps below.
Back up your key data
What would you do if your business files were lost to ransomware? To get back up and running we recommend offline backups, to enable quick restoration of business functions. In addition to encrypting files on your computers, ransomware attackers will often attempt to corrupt or alter existing backups. Offline backups are your best defence and will mean encrypted devices can be wiped and restored from offline backups.
Offline backups (cloud or disconnect physical media) are when the data can be protected from accidental or malicious deletion. They also should offer version retrieval, so that if ransomware removes access to files, you can recover them from a previous version. For more information, read the NCSC blog on backups.
Sign up for Exercise in a box
We recommend signing up for the NCSC’s free exercising tool. Have a look in particular at the ransomware and supply chain exercises.
Disable Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) - where possible...