Fast, precise containment is what turns a potential disaster into a contained incident. The faster you isolate compromised endpoints, lock or reset abused accounts, and shut down risky remote access, the fewer systems and data sets are impacted and the less time you spend rebuilding. Good containment is surgical: you keep the business running while cutting off just the attacker’s access.

MFA, conditional access, and backups are critical, but attackers design their campaigns to work around them. They use phishing kits and adversary‑in‑the‑middle techniques to steal both credentials and MFA tokens, exploit weaknesses in VPNs and firewalls, and increasingly focus on stealing data first, then encrypting systems. Backups help you recover, but they don’t prevent downtime, data theft, or reputational damage.

Huntress adds continuous monitoring of endpoints, identities, and logs plus a 24/7 SOC that understands attacker tradecraft. That combination is what turns your existing controls into a real defense against modern ransomware, not just a recovery plan.

Antivirus is based on known file signatures and often fails against modern, fileless attacks. Huntress Managed EDR looks for the tradecraft of the human attacker—how they move, escalate privileges, and execute commands—after they bypass basic defenses. Our human-led, 24/7 SOC is dedicated to threat hunting for these subtle activities, ensuring a response that generic preventative tools simply cannot deliver. We stop the human attacker before they can deploy the automated ransomware payload.

Our SOC finds and helps you actually evict the attacker and shut down their path to encryption, instead of just quarantining a file and hoping the ransomware never runs.

Ransomware canaries are special files Huntress places on your endpoints in locations where normal activity should never touch them.

If ransomware begins encrypting a machine, it almost always hits these canaries first. Huntress monitors them for unexpected modification or encryption. When a canary is tripped, it acts as an early warning signal: our SOC investigates and can move quickly to contain the threat, typically by isolating the affected endpoint.

Canaries give you a last‑line, behavior‑based signal that pairs with other detections to catch ransomware faster, even when the variant is new.

When early ransomware activity is detected, you don’t have hours to spare. With a managed approach like Huntress, suspicious signals are reviewed by our 24/7 SOC and turned into validated, actionable incidents in minutes, not days. The short window from detection to action is what keeps “suspicious behavior” from turning into encrypted endpoints. Unlike solutions that leave you to investigate a flood of alerts, we provide a definitive path to eject the attacker immediately, dramatically reducing the window of opportunity for the ransomware to execute.

Identities are the new perimeter. Ransomware groups will intercept MFA requests, steal session tokens, and ultimately compromise accounts to get access to your systems and data.

Attackers are increasingly stealing passwords and capturing session tokens so they can impersonate real users and admins. Once they hold a key identity, they can move freely, steal data, and deploy ransomware from the inside, which is why identity‑aware detection and rapid response are now critical parts of ransomware defense.

AI is best used to sift through the noise so humans can focus on real threats. It analyzes massive amounts of telemetry, spots patterns that look suspicious, and prioritizes alerts, but human analysts still make the call on what’s truly malicious and how to respond. The winning formula is AI for speed and scale, plus humans for judgment and nuanced response.

If ransomware executes in your environment, Huntress does more than send alerts. Our SOC helps you understand which endpoints and identities appear affected, how the attacker likely got in, and where they may have moved. We then advise on targeted containment—such as isolating specific systems and disabling accounts—and on safe recovery steps, including when to reimage, when to restore from backup, and what to harden before bringing systems back online. We materially reduce uncertainty and time‑to‑action during and after a ransomware event.

Many ransomware and extortion campaigns start with Microsoft 365 account takeover or business email compromise. Managed ITDR connects to your tenant and monitors identities and email for risky behavior: suspicious sign‑ins and locations, malicious inbox and forwarding rules, unusual OAuth app consents, and signs of token theft or session hijacking. When something looks wrong, our SOC investigates and responds quickly by revoking sessions, locking or restricting accounts, and guiding cleanup.

By treating Microsoft 365 identities as a first‑class attack surface, our team helps stop identity‑driven campaigns before they evolve into data theft or ransomware.