With the proliferation of ransomware attacks, every business feels the pressure—and often a sense of futility—in defending against cybercriminals. But companies can regain control by focusing on one of the most common attack vectors: Active Directory. Ransomware attacks often initially use AD security gaps, such as misconfigurations or weak passwords, to eventually gain access to as many endpoints and servers as possible.
No ransomware gang wants to see a single machine infected: They want every last part of your operations to be unusable, and your entire business brought to a halt. That way, they have a better chance of getting you to pay the ransom. But modern Windows client operating systems are reasonably up to date and are secure, causing determined cybercriminals to take a page from the data breach folks and first use AD to find ways to insert malicious ransomware code into your environment, access and delete your backups, and provide remote access for future attacks.