Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) works with partners to defend against today’s threats and collaborates to build a more secure and resilient infrastructure for the future. So what does this checklist achieve you may ask? It ensures you are taking the necessary steps to protect your environment. Implementing each of these steps will put your organization in the best position to stay away from cyber threats.

Ransomware continues to rapidly evolve and is designed to encrypt files on a system or endpoint, rendering that data unusable. Threat actors then demand a ransom in exchange for the decryption mechanism. These criminals have threatened to sell or leak data that has been exfiltrated unless the ransom is paid, and in some cases will sell or leak data anyway once the ransom is paid. While tactics continue to evolve, there are some basic, intermediate, and advanced activities that organizations can implement to prepare.

This process that you have undertaken to gather data points about where your organization stands with respect to this evolving threat is a great step along the path of cybersecurity posture maturity. The intention behind collecting the data points in the following questions is to boil-down complexities of ransomware preparedness into actionable information suitable for executive-level sponsorship of your organization’s cyber risk mitigation strategies. In short – the better the input, the better the output.