Ransomware jumpbag, when "VM" stands for "Vulnerability Management," and the power of AI

Is your business ready for a ransomware attack?

Ransomware attacks are becoming more frequent and destructive, and having a solid plan in place is essential for minimizing the impact. One critical part of that plan is creating a ransomware jump bag—a toolkit equipped with the tools, contacts, and resources needed for immediate response.

In 2024, a jump bag isn’t just physical anymore. While past kits included hard drives and forensic tools, today’s version also contains virtual resources like trusted copies of software, updated contact lists (including insurers and law enforcement), and offline copies of incident response workflows. Having these readily available, especially stored on immutable platforms like Cohesity’s FortKnox, ensures that your team can act quickly without relying on compromised systems.

Here’s a look at what should be in your modern ransomware jump bag:

1. Updated contact lists – Ensure internal and external stakeholders, like insurers and law enforcement, are easy to reach.
2. Mobile phones – Ensure communication remains intact if your internal systems are compromised.
3. Incident response workflows – Offline copies stored securely to keep your team on track, even when networks are down.
4. Trusted copies of response tools – Have known-good versions of essential software stored on an immutable platform to avoid compromised systems.
5. Storage devices – Secure storage for evidence gathering and forensic analysis, keeping chain of custody intact.

The sooner your organization can detect, contain, and recover from an attack, the more likely it is to avoid devastating business disruptions. Want to learn more about building your own ransomware jump bag? Click here to learn more and sign up for our ransomware resilience workshop!

Tech Insights - Strengthen your VMware environment with Vulnerability Management best practices

During this livestream, Shelly Calhoun-Jones, CISSP CCSK and Jedidiah Wallace break down how to enhance your VMware environment using vulnerability management best practices. With evolving threats like ransomware, safeguarding your ESXi hosts, VCenter, and virtual infrastructure is more important than ever.

Jed shares practical insights from his experience, covering the importance of patching systems, staggering updates, and monitoring threats in real-time. They also highlight tools like Nessus and Qualys for identifying vulnerabilities and keeping your environment secure.

Highlights from the discussion:

• Staggered patch rollouts: Minimize risk by applying patches in phases—start in development and test environments before moving to production.
• Micro-segmentation: Safeguard your network by controlling traffic between virtual machines, preventing malware from spreading laterally.
• Regular monitoring & threat feeds: Stay ahead by subscribing to threat feeds and conducting frequent scans for vulnerabilities.
• Training and awareness: Educate both end users and admins with simulated phishing attacks and penetration testing to reinforce good security habits.
• Clear communication: Keep stakeholders updated on emerging threats and ensure strong collaboration between security teams and leadership.

Get real-world examples of how these practices helped stop ransomware in its tracks. Click here learn more about Cohesity + VMware.

Unlock the power of AI with Cohesity Gaia

Is your enterprise ready to harness the full potential of your data? Cohesity Gaia offers a powerful solution, combining robust data protection with cutting-edge AI capabilities. By integrating advanced RAG AI and LLM technologies, Gaia empowers organizations to back up data securely while gaining deep insights through conversational AI.

Why Cohesity Gaia?

• Flexible deployment: Whether on-prem, in the cloud, or hybrid, Gaia adapts to your infrastructure needs.
• Advanced security: Fine-tuned RBAC policies ensure secure data access, protecting sensitive information.
• AI-powered data insights: Leverage AI to index, process, and retrieve data, offering deeper and more contextual insights.

What can you achieve?

• Enhanced data protection: Start with Cohesity DataProtect to safeguard cloud-native, SaaS, and on-prem data.
• AI-driven business insights: Use RAG AI and LLM to analyze your own data and receive context-rich responses.
• Faster data analysis: Ask complex questions in everyday language, and get quick, actionable insights from your data.

Want to dive deeper into how Cohesity Gaia transforms your data management? Click here to explore more!

Upcoming webinars and events

September 12: Ransomware Resilience Workshop: Salt Lake City

September 19: Ensure business resilience with Cohesity DataProtect integrated with Microsoft 365 Backup Storage

September 25: Cyber resilience in 2024: A conversation with Graham Cluley

October 15: EFM Idaho CIO/CISO – Executive Exchange

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Why Cohesity? As a leader in AI-powered data security, we make it easy to secure, protect, manage, and get value from data — across the data center, edge, and cloud. We help organizations defend against cybersecurity threats with comprehensive data security and management capabilities, including immutable backup snapshots, AI-based threat detection, monitoring malicious behavior, and rapid recovery at scale.