US authorities release ransomware threat assessment tool

The US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency has released a new self-assessment tool to help organisations to understand their cybersecurity posture in the wake of ongoing ransomware threats.

Called the Ransomware Readiness Assessment (RRA), the module was released as part of the 10.3.0 update to CISA's Cyber Security Evaluation Toolkit (CSET) on Github.

The RRA tool comes with a tutorial and a set of questions tiered as basic, intermediate and advanced.

CISA intends for organisations to focus on the basics at first, and then implement best practices in the intermediate and advanced sections.

CSET and RRA are released under the permissive MIT license, and run on Windows with a standalone installer.

The cyber security toolkit can also be built from source code, if preferred.

Several other cyber security tools have been released by CISA, including the Malcolm network traffic sniffer and the Cloud Optimised Operations Lab (COOL) security assessment environment.