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BEST PRACTICES TO PREVENT DARKSIDE RANSOMWARE


Ransomware is continuing to wreck havoc on companies and individuals, with the attacks getting more sophisticated on a daily basis. The latest was the Colonial Pipeline incident involving the Darkside ransomware.


While nothing is 100% secure, doing our best to prevent these things is a constant battle that enterprises worldwide must continue to fight.


With that Palo Alto Networks has released guidelines for preventing Darkside from infiltrating your network (official documentation here):

  • Antivirus signature, make sure all protocols, HTTP2, IMAP, POP3, and others, are set to "reset-both".

  • Vulnerability and spyware signatures with the severity of High and Critical to "reset-both" or "drop" is a good practice.

  • Your URL Filtering and setting the following categories to block: command and control, dynamic DNS, hacking, high-risk, insufficient-content, malware, newly-registered-domains, not-resolved, parked, phishing, questionable, unknown.

  • SSL Decryption is one of the requirements for detecting malicious patterns as most of our signatures use the http_decoder to inspect the content in the payload. The firewall can only inspect and encrypt traffic (TLS/SSL/HTTPS) if decrypted using decryption profile and policy.

  • File blocking profile: Block password-protected compressed and zip file.

  • Remote access to OT and IT networks needs multi-factor authentication.

  • Use strong spam filters to prevent phishing emails from reaching end-user.

  • Continuous monitoring and improvement in security posture based on alerts and threat logs.

  • Continuously train IT and end-user for social engineering.

  • Network traffic:

    • IP-based: prohibit ingress and egress communications with known malicious IP addresses.

    • URL-based: Prevent users from accessing malicious websites by implementing URL blocklists and allow lists.

  • Software-update: Make your software update as centralized and controlled.

  • Risk-based assessment strategy to determine which OT network assets and zones should participate in the patch management program.

    • Limit RDP

    • Limit Resources access

    • Limit resources access attempts

  • Regular Scanning of the resources by antivirus/antimalware.



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