What is a Ransomware Recovery and Remediation Team?

Recovery & Remediation are there to help.

A ransomware Recovery & Remediation team is a group of highly skilled professionals trained in assisting businesses with recovering from an incident.  Using a remediation team, an organization would limit the amount of damage that a breach can potentially cause to business operations.  In a recent DarkReading article we were quoted: “Since ransomware is unpreventable, then how can organizations minimize its impact and lessen the blow?”.  A seasoned IT recovery and remediation team will easily integrate with an organization’s local IT staff or MSP to reduce the stress of the recovery efforts.  This integration would allow the organization to focus on the day-to-day operations, keeping the business interruption to a minimum.

When and where are they needed?

Not all victim organizations have a recovery plan. They need guidance with recovery efforts. In many cases, they are not adequately staffed to recover from a cyber event. A Ransomware Recovery Team (RRT) can alleviate the pain in these areas. Whether onsite or remote, recovery consultants can assist in creating a recovery plan or provide training to prepare for a future ransomware attack. The RRT can either rebuild, restore, or recover critical systems to enable a speedy recovery.

Typically, recovery experts will focus on three key objectives:

• Assisting the Incident Response team (internal and external) with preserving critical evidence, deploying proprietary forensic tools, and potentially deploying an endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution to quarantine and secure the network.
• Rapidly triage the availability and integrity of backups to determine whether they are valid. If backups are determined to be viable, recovery experts will often aid the client in recovering without paying a ransom.
• Recover and/or remediate the environment in a prioritized manner to bring business operations back online. Recovery experts will assist with restoring systems from backup, deploying a decryption key, rebuilding from scratch, or a combination of these approaches, depending on the nature of the attack and its effects on the impacted organization.

Why are they Important?

When an organization suffers a ransomware incident, the consequences are often catastrophic for their business. Moreover, the fact that a company has suffered a breach is the result of operational risk controls failing. The failure means it is also likely they aren’t as prepared to handle the subsequent fallout from an attack. Crucially, recovery consultants provide support and a safe pair of hands in navigating the client out of the situation post-breach. In terms of mitigating risk exposure and ensuring the recovery efforts are as efficient as possible, recovery consultants can help in several critical areas, including:

• Preserving critical evidence and securing the client’s perimeter.
• Expertise involved in recovery triage, safely navigating the pitfalls, and speeding up the recovery. RRT consultants also increase the likelihood of not paying a ransom, which is increasingly essential given the regulatory pressure on facilitating ransom payments.
• Expedited recovery in getting critical systems back online, rapidly recovering post-attack and logistical knowledge in deploying resources rapidly where needed around the globe in support of flailing or even non-existent local IT teams.
• Trusted advisors. Recovery experts are on the frontline in dealing with ransomware attacks, day in and day out. They are best positioned to advise on what approaches work, and how to avoid the dangers on the path to recovery.

An experienced Recovery & Remediation team like at BreachQuest is money well spent reducing downtime and rebuilding quickly. Ultimately, experienced recovery consultants save crucial time and minimize business interruption as well as helping to mitigate the risk of re-infection, versus if a client was left to their own devices or utilize local IT providers.

Written by Chris Pacenza, BreachQuest’s Associate Director of Recovery & Remediation team.