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Introduction 1 These materials are © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Any dissemination, distribution, or unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. Introduction T he rise of ransomware over the past few years is an ever- growing problem that has quickly become an extremely lucrative criminal enterprise. Targeted organizations often believe that paying the ransom is the most cost-effective way to get their data back — and, unfortunately, this may be true. The problem is that every single business that pays to recover its files is directly funding the development of the next generation of ransomware. As a result, ransomware is evolving at an alarming rate with new and more sophisticated variants. Ransomware must be prevented when possible, detected when it attempts to breach a network, and contained to limit poten- tial damage when it infects systems and endpoints. Ransomware defense calls for a "new best-of-breed" architectural approach that spans the organization at the edge in the domain name sys- tem (DNS) layer to the data center and across endpoint devices no matter where they're being used. About This Book Ransomware Defense For Dummies consists of five short chapters that explore how ransomware operates and its defining charac- teristics (Chapter 1), security best practices to reduce ransomware risks (Chapter 2), a "new best-of-breed" security architecture (Chapter 3), the Cisco Ransomware Defense solution (Chapter 4), and important ransomware defense takeaways (Chapter 5). Foolish Assumptions It has been said that most assumptions have outlived their use- lessness, but I assume a few things nonetheless! Mainly, I assume that you know a few things about informa- tion security. Perhaps you're a C-level IT executive, IT director, senior IT architect, analyst, or manager, or a security, network, or system administrator. As such, this book is written primarily