Ransomware is nefarious: it creates a digital hostage situation that costs businesses in not only a possible ransom, but lost revenue in time, personnel allocation, data, and innumerable other resources.

Ransomware is commonly delivered through exploit kits, malvertising (infected ads on a website), phishing (fraudulent emails masquerading as trustworthy), or spam campaigns. The actual infection can begin when people click on a link or an attachment in a phishing email, an infected ad, or a compromised webpage that infect anyone going to that site.

This paper describes what ransomware is, what it does, and how customers can defend their organizations against it. We focus on ransomware here, but the process we describe applies to other threats as well.