Introduction

The phrase Ransomware strikes fear into the hearts of IT professionals the world over. Attackers infiltrate and cripple networks indiscriminately; hospitals, schools, factories, councils, utilities and of course government to name just a few.
These attacks are often followed by blog posts from prominent security vendors explaining why this ransomware event was more sinister and advanced than the last.

However, most ransomware operators aren't using sophisticated attack methods; because they just don't need to. Common misconfigurations, bad IT hygiene, lax patching and not following best practices give the bad guys all the attack surface they could ever dream of.

PreventRansomware.io intends to help system administrators to fix these misconfigurations via education.

If you absorb and apply the concepts within this documentation, your network will be able to fend off common attack techniques which lead to ransomware attacks, and you most likely won't have to spend any (or very much) money.

For those who are not big on reading long-form documentation or don’t have the time, we have condensed the documentation down into a top-five controls list and a helpful checklist PDF. If you already have a competent sysadmin or security team, you might be able to implement the proper controls quickly without trawling the entire set of documentation.