The recent increase in the number of employees working from home as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak has presented organizations with an unanticipated business issue: the enterprise network has now effectively become much larger, more dispersed, and more difficult to secure with the increase in remote work.

NetWalker has become one of the most popular ransomware families in 2020, targeting companies of all sizes and more recently favoring educational and healthcare institutions. The ransomware is using the current COVID-19 crisis to deploy phishing campaigns that prey on individuals interested in learning more about the virus, including healthcare facility staff.

Application Whitelisting works by specifying which applications can execute (The Whitelist) leaving everything else implicitly or explicitly denied (The Blacklist). Granted, there will always be some that fall in the middle (The Greylist) but those should be reserved for administrative decision.