Got hit with Cryptolocker on Monday

In no particular order of importance, do ALL of them...

  • Make some real firewall rules - DON'T just leave the default allow-any-outbound rules - ONLY allow traffic outbound on ports that you actually use/need, Example for DCs: 53,80,123,443,3544 Example for End-Users: 80,443,1935,3544

  • CryptoPrevent or some other Group Policy based software run restrictions - don't let any executable run from a temp location.

  • An end-user should never be a local admin. Admit it, you did this once-upon-a-time only cause you were tired/lazy and didn't take the time to set the permissions right on something.

  • Automatically remove all shares if/when the encryption starts to happen, see example here This can also be setup to email you the moment it happens, the filename, and the user who did it.

  • Use an Internet filter to block all the ccTLD's and IDN's your company doesn't really need - also block the known bad/malware domains - better yet also block advertisements (the source of much badware) - we use DNS Redirector, it's great and it doesn't cost a fortune.

  • Prevent access to any URL with an IP in it - only bad guys do links like http://93.184.216.34 - everything else should be a DNS name like http://example.com and therefore a DNS lookup (which is filtered) before getting out to the Internet.

  • User training: re-enforce that users should not click on things that look phishy, are spelled wrong, or they were not expecting - even if the email looks like it's someone they know. Provide a contest for the "crappiest email of the week/month" employee's should forward (or perhaps safer to print and submit them) and then IT picks the winner of a free [insert something more valuable than a bouncy-ball here] You can also do the inverse/negative approach: user who opens something infected must proudly display the dreaded [insert something more inappropriate than a bag of dog crap] at their desk for a whole week, they are not allowed to decorate/hide it.

  • Implement spam/email message filtering, if your users can't get to a bad link, then they can't click on a bad link.

  • Do backups, check that they are actually working. Make a "compliance game" if someone else (in your IT department) can delete a file (they should make their own backup first) and you can't restore it - then you owe them lunch. Shit get's solved real fast.

  • Try executable whitelisting, the idea being only software you know about can run, I think this is extreme and haven't resorted to doing it myself.

/r/sysadmin Thread