Interactive Ransomware Resilience Assessment
Evaluate your organization's ransomware preparedness and resilience across prevention, detection, response, and recovery capabilities. Get actionable recommendations to strengthen defenses against ransomware attacks.
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What Is Ransomware Resilience Assessment
A ransomware resilience assessment evaluates an organization's ability to prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from a ransomware attack. Ransomware remains the most financially devastating form of cyberattack — the average recovery cost reached $2.73 million in 2024 according to the Sophos State of Ransomware Report, with average downtime of 22 days.
This assessment evaluates your defenses across the ransomware kill chain: initial access prevention, execution blocking, lateral movement detection, data exfiltration prevention, backup integrity, and recovery capabilities.
Ransomware Kill Chain
| Stage | Attack Technique | Defense |
|---|---|---|
| Initial Access | Phishing email, RDP exploitation, VPN vulnerability | Email filtering, MFA, patch management, EDR |
| Execution | Malicious attachment, PowerShell, macro | Application allowlisting, script controls, EDR |
| Persistence | Registry modification, scheduled tasks, services | Endpoint monitoring, baseline comparison |
| Privilege Escalation | Credential theft, exploit local vulnerabilities | Least privilege, PAM, patch management |
| Lateral Movement | PsExec, WMI, RDP, SMB | Network segmentation, EDR, NDR |
| Exfiltration | Data theft before encryption (double extortion) | DLP, network monitoring, egress filtering |
| Encryption | File encryption, shadow copy deletion | Backup isolation, canary files, EDR |
| Extortion | Ransom demand, data leak threat | Incident response plan, communication plan, cyber insurance |
Common Use Cases
- Security gap analysis: Identify weaknesses in your ransomware defenses across prevention, detection, response, and recovery capabilities
- Board risk reporting: Quantify ransomware readiness for executive leadership with specific capability scores and remediation priorities
- Insurance qualification: Document ransomware controls for cyber insurance applications, which increasingly require specific protections (MFA, backups, EDR)
- Compliance alignment: Map ransomware resilience to NIST CSF, CIS Controls, and industry-specific requirements
- Incident preparation: Verify that your backup, response, and recovery capabilities will actually work when ransomware hits
Best Practices
- Implement immutable backups — Ransomware operators specifically target backups. Use immutable storage (WORM), air-gapped backups, or offline backup copies that cannot be encrypted by malware.
- Deploy EDR on all endpoints — Endpoint Detection and Response provides the most effective defense against ransomware execution. Ensure 100% coverage, not just servers.
- Enforce MFA everywhere — MFA on VPN, email, RDP, and privileged accounts blocks the most common initial access vectors. SMS-based MFA is better than nothing but phishable — use hardware keys or app-based MFA.
- Test backup restoration — 60% of organizations that pay ransoms still cannot fully recover. Regular restore testing (monthly for critical systems) is the only way to verify your recovery capability.
- Segment networks aggressively — Flat networks allow ransomware to spread from a single compromised endpoint to every system. Segment by function and restrict lateral movement with firewall rules.
References & Citations
- CISA, FBI, and Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center. (2024). StopRansomware Guide. Retrieved from https://www.cisa.gov/stopransomware (accessed January 2025)
- Sophos. (2024). The State of Ransomware 2024. Retrieved from https://www.sophos.com/en-us/labs/security-threat-report (accessed January 2025)
Note: These citations are provided for informational and educational purposes. Always verify information with the original sources and consult with qualified professionals for specific advice related to your situation.
Key Security Terms
Understand the essential concepts behind this tool
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about the Interactive Ransomware Resilience Assessment
Ransomware resilience assessment evaluates your ability to prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from ransomware attacks. It examines backup strategies, network segmentation, endpoint protection, email security, access controls, incident response plans, and recovery capabilities. Assessment identifies vulnerabilities and provides prioritized recommendations to reduce ransomware risk and minimize impact if attacked.