Ransomware Restoration
Ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly common and devastating for businesses of all sizes. As a cyber risk insurance provider, you play a critical role in helping your clients recover from these attacks. However, the ransomware restoration process can be much more costly and time-consuming when you don’t have the right partner in place.
Fast Ransomware Restoration Saves Big Dollars for Business Interruption Insurers
Partnering with Ransomware Restoration Firms
Ransomware attacks can cause significant damage to a business’s operations, reputation, and bottom line. When your clients are affected by ransomware, they need a comprehensive plan that includes not only breach counsel, forensics and negotiation, but also system and data restoration. The ransomware restoration process has more impact on reducing business interruption losses than any other step in the full lifecycle of ransomware response and recovery. Reducing that cost is where the right restoration firm come into play.
Restoration firms specialize in providing comprehensive services to businesses that have been affected by ransomware. They can help your clients recover their data, restore their systems, and resume their operations as quickly as possible. By partnering with a reputable restoration firm, you can ensure that your clients have access to the best possible services when they need them most.
The Benefits of Partnering with Ransomware Restoration Firms
Not all restoration firms are the same. Partnering with right one can provide several benefits for your clients resulting in dramatic reductions in overall case cost.
- Rapid Response: Restoration firms can respond quickly to a ransomware attack, minimizing the time your clients are without access to their data and systems. The faster your clients can resume their operations, the less impact the attack will have on their business. The right firm will have U.S.-based staff working and answering calls 24 hours per day. This means getting restoration going at the same time breach counsel and DFIR (digital forensics and incident response) is starting work.
- Comprehensive Services & Process: Restoration firms provide comprehensive services and refined processes that go beyond data restoration. They can help your clients with business impact analysis to bring back the most mission critical systems first. This gets your clients back to making sales, shipping product, doing payroll and running other critical business functions days or weeks earlier than an undisciplined restoration and recovery process.
- Cost Savings: By partnering with a mature restoration firm, you can help your clients save money by minimizing business interruption. The quicker they resume operations, the less their losses are, resulting in a lower payout for you. Providing this better and more mature service for your insureds will bolster the value of your insurance product.
- Enhanced Reputation: When your clients are affected by a ransomware attack, their reputation is on the line. The long-term damage to your clients goes beyond what you see in business interruption; the damage to their brand can last for years. By providing them with access to top-notch restoration services, you can help them restore their reputation and demonstrate their commitment to data security and business continuity.
- Better Risk Management: Partnering with a good restoration firm can help you manage your own risk as a cyber risk insurance provider. By ensuring that your clients have access to the best possible restoration services, you can minimize the risk of a claim dispute or legal action related to inadequate restoration services. Good restoration firms provide valuable post-breach services to victims to make sure their cyber hygiene is not only clean immediately after the breach, but that it stays that way for years to come
Choosing the Right Ransomware Restoration Firm
Choosing the right restoration firm is critical to ensuring that your clients receive the best possible services so that they incur minimal damages. When selecting a restoration firm to partner with, consider the following factors:
- Expertise: Look for a firm with extensive experience in recovering from ransomware attacks. The firm should have a proven track record of success in restoring data and systems and helping businesses resume their operations quickly.
- Response Time: Look for a restoration firm that can respond quickly to a ransomware attack. The faster the firm can begin the restoration process, the less impact the attack will have on your client’s business. The restoration firm should have U.S.-based staff working 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, especially on big holidays.
- Services: The firm should offer a comprehensive range of services, including and ability to quickly eject the threat actors, provide quality data restoration, have skilled technical teams in the compute stack and network stack categories essential to an effective recovery, in additional to other critical services.
- Unique IP: The top restoration firms bring a whole new level of intellectual property (IP) to the recovery process that you won’t find with less mature operations. Without that IP, you will generally add a week to the recovery process.
- Established Teams: The most mature operations utilize proven payrolled W2 staff, and not 1099 contractors or less sophisticated MSPs. Established restoration teams have all the right players onboard who have worked dozens, or hundreds, of prior cases together. This speeds recovery by avoiding the random and sometimes chaotic activities of less experienced or virtually assembled teams.
- Good Partnering: The best restoration firms are experienced at partnering with breach counsel, DFIR (digital forensics and incident response), and negotiation firms. They can work in parallel with the other professionals from hour one of the case, without issues that hinder cases with less experienced teams, such as accidentally overwriting critical log files or arguing with breach counsel about how to handle a case.
- Reputation: Choose a restoration firm with a strong reputation in the industry. Look for firms with positive reviews from breach counsel, DFIR firms, and clients that demonstrate a track record of delivering high-quality restoration services in shorter timeframes.
- Total Cost of Ransomware Recovery (TCRR): While cost of service is an important consideration, it should not be the primary factor when choosing a restoration firm. Look for a firm that offers competitive pricing but also delivers the fast, high-quality restoration services your insureds need to recover from a ransomware attack. Think in terms of TCRR, as that factors in all aspects of a ransomware recovery for which the insurer must payout.
Ransomware Blogs
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.