Ransomware is one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity threats facing organizations and individuals today. Attackers are holding everything from government records to health care equipment and even the keys to entire transit systems for ransom. According to new data from IBM, victims are paying up.

More than half of the business executives that responded to the survey, titled “Ransomware: How Consumers and Businesses Value Their Data,” said they had faced ransomware attacks. Seventy percent of those businesses paid the attackers, often more than $10,000. To help security teams fend off these attacks, Resilient launched the first ever Dynamic Playbook for ransomware attacks.

Call the Right Plays

The new Dynamic Playbook technology underpins all our agile playbooks going forward. This is the latest incident response (IR) innovation from Resilient — versatile playbooks that automatically adapt to real-time incident conditions to ensure a fast and complete response.

Ransomware is becoming increasingly sophisticated. New ransomware families are emerging at an alarming rate, and attackers are leveraging new strategies and targeting Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Dynamic Playbooks provide organizations with the ability to prepare for and respond to ransomware attacks, a critical skill for security teams of all sizes.

As ransomware attacks become more complex, specific attributes become more important. IT leaders must ask the following questions:

• Does the attack impact company executives?
• Is the malware present on other users’ machines? If so, how many users are impacted?
• What types of data or devices are affected?
• Are the data and devices recoverable?
• What is the value of the data and/or devices affected?

The answers to these questions are critical to containing and resolving the attack. With Dynamic Playbooks, the response procedure is custom-built based on this information, providing a direct and specific plan that maps to each unique attack before an analyst even opens the incident.

Respond to Complex Ransomware Attacks

To battle today’s top security threats — complex attacks, a skills shortage and the increasing volume of incidents — it’s up to security leaders to ensure their teams are empowered to succeed.

Dynamic Playbooks arm security teams with advanced technology that enables them to respond to complex attacks and get more value from existing tools. It saves analysts time by automatically performing repetitive initial triage steps. This increases SOC productivity by automatically adapting the response process to meet the attack, and ensures that the right analyst is working on the right tasks with the right tools.

Download the latest ransomware report from IBM X-Force