Absolute Software says the solution features capabilities that will help customers assess their ransomware preparedness and cyber hygiene across endpoints; maintain mission-critical security applications; and expedite quarantine and recovery of devices if an attack occurs.

The launch comes timely as research firm Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that organisations will face ransomware attacks every two seconds by 2031, faster than every 11 seconds in 2021.

The research firm adds that the accelerated adoption of work-from-anywhere has expanded potential ransomware attacks—and in turn, has increased demand to extend preparedness and recovery efforts to end user devices.

“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 scenario: falling victim to an attack,” explains 451 Research (part of S&P Global Market Intelligence) principal research analyst Eric Hanselman in a recent webinar.

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

“Ransomware is more prevalent, more sophisticated, and more capable of disruption and damage than ever and organisations need to plan for ‘when,’ not ‘if,’ they are successfully attacked,” says Absolute Director channel sales Asia Pacific Chris Barton.

“When a ransomware attack occurs, organisations 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.”

Absolute Software includes several features to bolster ransomware preparation such as:

Assess strategic readiness across endpoints: Customers can review security controls and identify key applications and device management tools required to minimise ransomware exposure and accelerate recovery.

Establish cyber hygiene and resiliency baseline: Users can 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: Customers report on hardware and software inventory across their endpoints and assess overall device security posture. Scan for sensitive data 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: Customers can communicate with end users even if their devices are compromised, quarantine and freeze endpoints, restore endpoint security and device management tools that have been rendered inoperable, and execute custom workflow and task automation commands. 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, the security company stated.

These capabilities are also available as add-on modules for existing Absolute Control and Resilience service tier customers. To learn more, visit here.