Topic: Stopping Ransomware in Its Tracks

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Stopping Ransomware in Its Tracks

At every partner visit I have, I hear about ransomware – the malware that makes our customers’ files unusable until they pay off the attacker. It’s everywhere, hitting large and small businesses with equal disruptions and damage. And customers are begging for help in keeping ransomware out of their endpoints and servers.

Just how bad is it? Ransomware is the “fastest growing malware threat, targeting users of all types – from the home user to the corporate network,” according to a recent U.S. government interagency report. An average of 4,000 ransomware attacks occurred daily in 2016, up a whopping 300 percent from the year before, the report states.

McAfee has the answer to this threat in Endpoint Security 10.5.

As I discussed in my previous blog, ENS 10.5 is McAfee’s most advanced endpoint security platform ever. It provides an array of detection, identification, and response capabilities, including machine-learning technology that quickly and efficiently spots ransomware and automatically shares detection intelligence with other endpoints. Speed is the means for thwarting ransomware attacks, and ENS 10.5 has it.

ENS 10.5 takes an even more vigorous and proactive approach to combatting ransomware. ENS 10.5 delivers multiple enhancements to McAfee Threat Intelligence, which has been renamed Adaptive Threat Protection to reflect the machine-learning technology underpinning it. These include the addition of new McAfee-defined queries for Real Protect and the Real Protect scanner, which inspects suspicious files and activities on an endpoint to detect malicious patterns using machine-learning techniques.

ENS 10.5 isn’t just about ransomware. The new product is a platform full of powerful threat prevention enhancements, including:

• The ability to configure a Windows registry scan location for on-demand scans

• The ability to create a custom Access Protection rule to protect Windows services

• Management of Exploit Prevention signatures and Application Protection rules

• The ability to display false-positive mitigation events using the Endpoint Security Threat Prevention: False Positive Mitigation Events query


Advanced malware and ransomware protection is critical today, but will become even more important over the next couple of years. We’re already seeing ransomware attack Internet of Things (IoT) devices as a means for getting into our customers’ networks. Soon, these attacks will prevent businesses from leveraging autonomous devices and cripple operations. Already, we’re seeing IoT devices being held for ransom in the power distribution and health care verticals.

Ransomware can turn a good day into a terrible one for a home user and a good month into a disaster for an enterprise. McAfee ENS 10.5 is built to detect and destroy zero-day malware to assure that customers’ days, weeks, months, and years are ransomware-free.

Our job is to help protect our mutual customers from the ransomware scourge. McAfee has a collection of information and resources for you to help guide customers through the migration from legacy products to ENS 10.5. Check out all of the ENS 10.5 sales, technical, and support resources available to you in the partner portal.

Together is Power!


Original article: By Ken McCray on  May 15, 2017