Key Takeaways:
- A ransomware response plan is critical for business continuity. Without one, recovery is slower, risk is higher, and data loss is more likely.
- Preventative measures like employee training, network segmentation, and secure, immutable backups reduce the chance of infection and limit damage.
- Rapid detection and response, combined with clear communication to stakeholders and authorities, can help contain incidents and protect reputation.
- Containment, eradication, and clean restoration from verified backups ensure systems are recovered without reinfection.
- Post‑incident reviews and ongoing monitoring strengthen defenses and improve readiness for future attacks.
Ransomware is malicious software that encrypts files to prevent users from accessing or using computer systems. Usually accompanied by a ransom demand, a ransomware attack cripples infected computers, servers, and files. Attacks are common; the Veeam 2025 Ransomware Trends & Proactive Strategies Report revealed that in the preceding 12 months, 69% of organizations experienced at least one cyberattack. While 64% paid the ransom, only 49% of those organizations actually regained access to their data. On the other hand, 25% of organizations who were attacked recovered their data without paying a ransom. These organizations had clean, immutable, and reliable backups as well as an integrated ransomware response strategy that worked as intended. This shows that it is possible to recover from an attack if you have a robust plan to handle ransomware attacks.
Key Components of a Ransomware Response Plan
Since cyberattacks are so common, knowing how to recover quickly from a ransomware attack is essential. Critical aspects of your ransomware recovery plan should include hardening systems, rigorous prevention measures, ransomware detection and response, recovery and restoration measures, and plans to inform relevant authorities and affected parties. Always conduct a post-incident analysis to help prevent future attacks.
Step 1: Preventative Measures
You can take several measures to prevent and mitigate ransomware attacks. These include employee education, risk assessment, hardening hardware and software solutions, network segmentation, and having secure data backups. Key steps to take include:
Educate employees: Your employees are your first line of defense against malware attacks, so you should train them to recognize attacks and educate them about ransomware threats and how to detect signs of compromised systems.
Perform risk assessments: Use expert teams to perform risk assessments to identify weak points in your malware and ransomware defenses.
Harden port and endpoint settings: Disable unused remote access tools and limit Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and other remote access protocol ports to trusted hosts. Similarly, harden your endpoints with secure configuration settings.
Segment networks and enforce access controls: Segment networks using virtual local area networks (VLANs), virtual private networks (VPNs), and physical tools where appropriate. Clearly isolate public and private networks and keep backup network traffic away from production traffic. Not only does this provide a layer of isolation and makes forensic analysis easier, it may also improve backup recovery point objectives (RPOs) because backup traffic does not have to contend with production traffic. Be sure to always adopt the principle of zero trust when granting access too.
Implement all software updates and patches: Limit the risk of intrusion by meticulously implementing updates and security patches.
Adopt secure backup and data redundancy policies: Carefully plan your backup strategy, as this represents your last line of defense. Back up frequently and ensure you have immutable copies that cannot be changed. Keep at least one set of backups entirely offline and check backup integrity regularly.
Step 2: Detection and Response
It’s crucial to react promptly to any ransomware incident. With the proper monitoring tools, it’s often possible to disrupt an attack even while it’s in progress. You should have 24/7 coverage and online ransomware detection tools to do this. In this way, you mitigate the damage and can clean your systems faster, as follows:
Determine impacted systems: Establish which systems are affected and immediately isolate them from the rest of the network. If the attack has impacted several systems and it is not possible to initially verify its extent, take the network offline. If you cannot easily take systems offline, limit the scope of the infection by unplugging ethernet cables and disabling Wi-Fi.
Power down equipment: If it’s not possible to disconnect devices from the network, power down the affected equipment. Note that this step may remove evidence held in volatile memory.
Triage affected systems: Identify systems that are critical to the organization and list them in order of importance in terms of the organization’s priorities. Ongoing data classification and prioritization should be a priority within your organization.
Examine logs: Review system logs to identify precursors such as dropper malware, earlier attacks, and compromised networks.
Determine what happened: Establish the sequence of events leading to the attack and how the actor was able to penetrate your network.
Find the threat: Identify the ransomware, its variant, and any other malware on the system.
Step 3: Communication and Reporting
Report the incident and transparently communicate what has happened with the affected parties. Prompt communications will help mitigate longer-term consequences like loss of credibility and punitive damages. Actions to take include:
Communicate internally: Inform all affected employees and functions immediately and notify them of steps that were taken to contain the incident. Issue regular updates.
Notify relevant authorities: Report the incident to local or national law enforcement officials as required by local ordinances. Ensure you meet all legal obligations with regard to specific privacy and data protection regulations.
Communicate externally: Notify customers and business partners of the incident and release appropriate information regarding the extent of the damage. Note that it’s common for criminals to threaten to release confidential information to coerce victims into paying the ransom.
Be prepared: Have internal and external communications ready in draft form. Plan for any additional organizational capacity that may be required after an attack. For example, this might look like increasing customer support staff.
Be transparent: While it is natural for companies to want to hide damaging information, news of cyberattacks inevitably gets out. Transparency minimizes harm to reputation, helps investigators, and provides affected parties with an opportunity to take steps to protect sensitive data.
Step 4: Containment Strategies
Before taking steps to eradicate ransomware from your system, capture system images and volatile memory contents for all infected devices. This information is helpful during forensic investigations to determine what happened and how your systems were compromised. It is vital to preserve volatile information stored in the system memory, security logs, and firewall log buffers.
Consult with federal law enforcement authorities, the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), and your security vendor to identify whether researchers have developed decryption tools or identified encryption flaws you can use to decrypt your data. These resources may also provide additional information about steps to take to identify impacted systems and how to turn off ransomware binaries.
Step 5: Eradication Strategies
The primary goal of your eradication strategy is to remove all traces of ransomware and malware from your systems, distinct from data. While it is sometimes possible to sanitize your systems, it is generally more straightforward and much safer to wipe them and rebuild them from scratch using templates and clean images. Steps include:
- Address and block identified vulnerabilities, websites, and malware.
- Wipe or sanitize all infected systems.
- Rebuild corporate systems, starting with critical systems.
- Reset all passwords.
- Issue a declaration from the designated IT authority once you have eradicated all traces of ransomware and rebuilt systems to confirm that the ransomware incident is over.
Step 6: Recovery and Restoration
At this point, you can now restore your data and get back to work. It is also when you will benefit from the foresight that led you to use innovative solutions to recover quickly from ransomware attacks. Veeam offers several solutions that you can get up and running quickly.
Steps for resilient recovery and restoration include:
- Using secure backups to restore systems.
- Making sure that your backups are clean so you do not reinfect your systems during recovery.
- Implementing lessons learned from the attack to strengthen security measures.
- Deploying ongoing ransomware monitoring solutions.
- Completing a post-incident evaluation.
Best Practices for Ransomware Incident Response
The frequency of ransomware attacks nowadays means that you should consider them in the same category as other business continuity management plans. These include strategies for dealing with major incidents, natural disasters, and disaster recovery (DR).
The starting point for a ransomware incident response plan is a thoroughly researched and documented recovery plan. Typically, this plan includes all stakeholders, a clear statement of the recovery objectives, and communication strategies. The plan should identify responsible parties and clearly define actions to take when a ransomware attack hits.
Points to consider include:
Response team: Identify all members of your response team, their responsibilities, and functions. Appoint a designated leader who is responsible for coordinating activities.
Inventory: Compile a complete list of all physical and cloud hardware and software assets, together with diagrams of how these interconnect. This includes special features such as VPNs, virtual private clouds, WANs, and APIs.
Critical functions: List and prioritize critical business functions, applications, datasets, and backups.
Emergency contact list: Include all employees, service providers, suppliers, and customers who may be impacted by a ransomware incident.
Training: Train team members in their roles and responsibilities and simulate incidents to ensure each person is familiar and comfortable with their role.
Ransomware action plan: Prepare a detailed ransomware response action plan.
Practice: Regularly simulating a ransomware response will help ensure team preparedness.
Lessons learned: Document lessons learned during training simulations and actual attacks.
Formalizing and adopting these ransomware protection best practices will help your organization respond quickly and effectively when you come under attack and ensure you have clean backups to restore and reconnect services.
Getting Started with Veeam
While it is always possible to recreate IT structures, a business cannot survive a ransomware attack if it cannot access clean data. Veeam’s online backup solution solves this problem. Veeam offers a single solution that gives you total control over your recovery with multi-layered immutability, comprehensive monitoring, and automation. Veeam works with common cloud-based solutions as well as on-premises solutions for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
Contact us today to learn more about our ransomware data recovery solutions or download our dedicated whitepaper, Building a Cyber-Resilient Data Recovery Strategy, for more tips on achieving cyber resiliency.
Related content
Why Ransomware Attacks Work and What You Can Do Besides Pay the Ransom
2023 Global Report on Ransomware Trends
FAQs
What is the first step if my organization experiences a ransomware attack?
Immediately isolate affected systems to prevent the malware from spreading. Disconnect impacted devices from the network, disable Wi‑Fi and VPN connections, and, if necessary, power them down. Once containment is in place, assess the scope of the incident and activate your documented ransomware response plan to guide detection, communication, and recovery efforts.
How often should we update our ransomware response plan?
Review and update your ransomware response plan at least quarterly or whenever significant infrastructure, personnel, or regulatory changes occur. Conduct post‑incident updates after any real or simulated ransomware event to incorporate lessons learned and strengthen your overall cyber resilience.
What are common mistakes organizations make during ransomware incidents?
Frequent mistakes include paying the ransom without a guaranteed outcome, delaying communication to stakeholders and authorities, and lacking clean, verified backups for recovery. Other missteps include failing to isolate infected systems quickly, underestimating the scope of the attack, and not practicing the response plan before an incident occurs.
Should you ever pay the ransom in a ransomware attack?
Paying the ransom does not guarantee you’ll regain access to all your data. Many victims recover only a portion, even after payment. It can also encourage further attacks and may violate regulatory or legal guidelines in some regions. The most effective strategy is to rely on clean, immutable backups and a tested recovery plan so you can restore operations without paying.
How do immutable backups protect against ransomware?
Immutable backups are stored in a write‑once, read‑many (WORM) format, meaning they cannot be altered or deleted within a defined retention period. This prevents ransomware from encrypting or erasing recovery copies. With Veeam’s immutable storage and air‑gapping, organizations can ensure backup data remains untouched and ready for secure restoration after an incident.