Modernize Data Security to Protect Against Ransomware
Get back in control of your data through strong privileged access standards
Ransomware is the most immediate cybersecurity threat for organizations. As billion-dollar ransomware stories continue to take center stage in headlines, conversations around how to protect against ransomware are at the forefront of security conversations. However, ransomware attacks continue to see success today because organizations aren’t focusing their security strategy on the real target of ransomware attacks - data.
Securing against ransomware isn’t just a technology problem, IT problem, or security problem - it's a business problem. The effect of ransomware includes loss of customer trust, a hit to company reputation, and of course, significant financial loss.
105%
increase in ransomware in 2021
2,048
ransomware complaints from January to July 31, 2021. This represents a 62% year-over-year increase.
By 2025,75%
IT organizations will face one or more attacks, as free-rein researchers have documented a dramatic increase in ransomware attacks during 2020, pointing to sevenfold or higher rates of growth.
Veza plays a critical role in protecting against ransomware by detecting elevated privileges humans and services have on data systems, discovering cloud IAM misconfigurations leading to access to data via roles/policies/permissions, and identifying local roles / local users with privilege permissions to databases. Read on to learn more about how authorization is central to securing your organization from ransomware.
Veza to protect against ransomware
Stop ransomware by managing least privilege access to data
At its core, a ransomware attack is a problem of excess - permissions, access, privilege. A ransomware threat actor needs to be able to write over data with encryption, which generally is only allowed to a small set of privileged accounts. All too often, organizations don’t have the ability to identify which accounts (humans or services) are authorized to have that kind of interaction with data.
You need to be able to see and control who has permission to encrypt the data, not just read it. Prevention and mitigation start with understanding the scope of authorization (users to groups to roles to policies to permissions) on data, for any account - human and non-human (ie service accounts and principals). Establish strong data access governance practices backed by the principle of least privilege to mitigate the probability of a successful ransomware attack.
Continuously detect cloud IAM and infrastructure misconfigurations
Cloud IAM is the backbone of managing fine-grained authorization-based access to cloud services (data, apps, systems). Organizations define what IAM roles, IAM policies, and system-specific permissions should be assigned to resources. However, keeping up with the scope of access permissions and identities in large-scale, multi-cloud environments often leads to undetected exposure and privilege abuse.
With Veza, you can easily manage
Sensitive IAM Actions
Azure AD users or Okta users that can assume roles in different AWS accounts to use KMS encrypt keys for encrypting the unencrypted S3 bucket
Incident Response and Detection
Service accounts or human users that have access to certain specific IAM roles that are associated with Service Control Policies (SCPs) which grant permissions to sensitive Redshift clusters/tables
Privileged Access
Okta users or Azure AD users that are associated with IAM roles that allow AssumeRole lateral movement with privilege elevation to Admin
Protect against ransomware with a modern approach to data security.
Learn more about Veza.