Absolute Software unveils ransomware response offering

Absolute Software has announced the availability of Absolute Ransomware Response, designed to enable customers to strengthen preparedness and accelerate endpoint recovery in the face of the ever-growing threat of ransomware attacks.

As part of the company's Secure Endpoint product portfolio, this new offering ensures organisations have the key capabilities and services needed to assess their ransomware preparedness and cyber hygiene across endpoints; ensure mission-critical security applications, such as anti-malware and device management tools, remain healthy and capable of self-healing; and expedite the quarantine and recovery of devices if an attack occurs.

"Ransomware is more prevalent, more sophisticated, and more capable of disruption and damage than ever and organisations need to plan for 'when,' not 'if,' they are successfully attacked," says Chris Barton, Absolute's director channel sales, Asia Pacific.

"When a ransomware attack occurs, organisations are often forced to weigh the risks of cutting off all communication with an infected device, losing the ability to restore or recover it, or leaving the door open for re-infection. This new offering gives them the cyber resiliency needed to mitigate ransomware deployment techniques, restore and update tools critical to recovery, and if needed, hit the 'kill switch' – meaning they can wipe the device while still maintaining control so it can be recovered.

Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that organisations will face a new ransomware attack every two seconds by 2031, up from every 11 seconds in 2021. While the top priority for IT and security teams has historically been securing and restoring critical infrastructure, such as servers and business applications, the accelerated adoption of 'work-from-anywhere' has significantly expanded the potential ransomware attack surface – and in turn, has increased the need to extend preparedness and recovery efforts to end user devices.

"The reality is that, while organisations are very concerned about the time to recover from ransomware attacks, they often solely focus on prevention tools, without planning for the worst-case scenario: falling victim to an attack," says Eric Hanselman, principal research analyst at 451 Research, part of S-P Global Market Intelligence, in a recent webinar.

"By building a plan and improving their preparedness and simplifying the endpoint recovery process for their organisations, they can accelerate businesses' ability to recover and resume operations.

Key capabilities and benefits available with Absolute's new Ransomware Response offering include:

• Assess Strategic Readiness Across Endpoints: Empower customers to review the existing security controls deployed across their endpoints, and identify key applications (e.g., anti-virus/anti-malware, endpoint protection, or endpoint detection and response) and device management tools required to minimise ransomware exposure and accelerate recovery efforts.
• Establish Cyber Hygiene and Resiliency Baseline: Enable application resilience policies that monitor and self-heal the critical controls identified during the assessment phase, to both mitigate the risk of a successful ransomware attack and ensure that tools may be restored if an attack renders them inoperable. This also includes training customer personnel on how to monitor application health and apply these baseline resilience policies to new Absolute-enabled devices.
• Monitor Device Security Posture and Sensitive Data: Allow customers to report on hardware and software inventory across their endpoints and assess overall device security posture. Scan for sensitive data – such as financial information, social security numbers, personally identifiable information, protected health information, and intellectual property – to identify devices most at risk for data extraction and enable proper back-up via customers' existing tools.
• Expedite Device Recovery and Limit Re-Infection: Equip customers with the capabilities needed to communicate with end users even if their devices are compromised; quarantine and freeze endpoints to limit further spread of infection and preserve evidence for litigation purposes; restore endpoint security and device management tools that have been rendered inoperable; and execute custom workflow and task automation commands to expedite device recovery. In addition, Absolute experts are available to remotely assist customers with endpoint recovery efforts leveraging Absolute's product capabilities.
• Absolute Ransomware Response is available for purchase for new customers as part of the company's Secure Endpoint product offerings.

These capabilities are also available as add-on modules for existing Absolute Control and Resilience service tier customers.