Absolute Software Introduces Ransomware Response Offering amidst growing cyber concerns

Absolute Software, a leader in self-healing and secure access solutions, have announced the launch of Absolute Ransomware Response, enabling customers to prepare and accelerate their endpoint recovery, in the face of the growing threat of ransomware attacks.

The offering, part of Absolute Software’s Secure Endpoint product portfolio, will help organizations have the key capabilities and services needed to assess their ransomware preparedness and cyber resilience across endpoints.

It also ensures mission-critical security applications, such as anti-malware and device management tools, remain healthy and capable of self-healing. Should an attack occur, Absolute Ransomware Response can expedite the quarantine and recovery of devices.

Absolute Ransomware Response has been developed to help protect businesses against the growing ransomware threat, which has surged since the accelerated adoption of a ‘work-from-anywhere’ operations model. This popular method of working has significantly expanded the potential ransomware attack and, in turn, has increased the need to extend preparedness and recovery efforts to end-user devices.

In fact, Cybersecurity Ventures predicted that organizations will face a new ransomware recovery attack every 2 seconds by 2031, up from every 11 seconds in 2021.

John Herrema, EVP of Product & Strategy at Absolute Software, said:

“Ransomware is more prevalent, more sophisticated, and more capable of disruption than ever and organizations need to plan for ‘when’, not ‘if’ they are successfully attacked.

“When a ransomware attack occurs, organizations are often forced to weigh the risks of cutting off all communication with an infected device, losing the ability to restore or recover it, or leaving the door open for re-infection. This new offering gives them the cyber resiliency needed to mitigate ransomware deployment techniques, restore and update tools critical to recovery, and if needed, hit the ‘kill switch’ – meaning they can wipe the device while still maintaining control so it can be recovered.

Eric Hanselman, Principal Research Analyst at 451 Research, said:

“The reality is that, while organisations are very concerned about the time to recover from ransomware attacks, they often solely focus on prevention tools, without planning for the worst-case secenario: falling victim to an attack.

“By building a plan and improving the preparedness and simplifying the endpoint recovery process for their organisations, they can accelerate businesses’ ability to recover and resume operations.”

Key capabilities and benefits available with Absolute’s new Ransomware Response offering include:

• Assess Strategic Readiness Across Endpoints: Empower customers to review the existing security controls deployed across their endpoints, and identify key applications (e.g., anti-virus/anti-malware, endpoint protection, or endpoint detection and response) and device management tools required to minimize ransomware exposure and accelerate recovery efforts.
• Establish Cyber Hygiene and Resiliency Baseline: Enable application resilience policies that monitor and self-heal the critical controls identified during the assessment phase, to both mitigate the risk of a successful ransomware attack and ensure that tools may be restored if an attack renders them inoperable. This also includes training customer personnel on how to monitor application health and apply these baseline resilience policies to new Absolute-enabled devices.
• Monitor Device Security Posture and Sensitive Data: Allow customers to report on hardware and software inventory across their endpoints and assess overall device security posture. Scan for sensitive data – such as financial information, social security numbers, personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), and intellectual property – to identify devices most at risk for data extraction and enable proper back-up via customers’ existing tools.
• Expedite Device Recovery and Limit Re-Infection: Equip customers with the capabilities needed to communicate with end users even if their devices are compromised; quarantine and freeze endpoints to limit further spread of infection and preserve evidence for litigation purposes; restore endpoint security and device management tools that have been rendered inoperable; and execute custom workflow and task automation commands to expedite device recovery. In addition, Absolute experts are available to remotely assist customers with endpoint recovery efforts leveraging Absolute’s product capabilities.

Absolute Ransomware Response is available for purchase for new customers as part of the company’s Secure Endpoint product offerings. These capabilities are also available as add-on modules for existing Absolute Control and Resilience service tier customers.