How Recent Ransomware Assaults Affected Companies

According to prominent news organizations, cyber-criminals had got away with over $209m during January-March 2016 that was over 8 times more than the whole earlier annum. Drawing attention to FBI's data, CNN forecasted 2016 as witnessing cyber-crooks garner over $1bn through ransomware assaults before the period concluded. The USD 209m stat got mentioned from both Reuters and Los Angeles Times, with the former describing it to be damages and the latter reporting it as profits.

Until IT personnel begin considering these threats with seriousness as well as adopt an increased proactive stance, there will be continuous such otherwise preventable assaults on organizations. Known security flaws in spite of patches are letting cyber-criminals to contaminate whole computer networks like it happened with WannaCry; therefore, it's critical that organizations make sure they update their systems for preventing repeats. Scmagazine.com posted this, October 2, 2017.

The ransom software WannaCrypt got disseminated via EternalBlue a vulnerability in Windows SMB which was patched during March this year; however, got excessively abused during the WannaCry assaults of May 2017 as well as the NotPetya assaults of June 2017. Understandably, the assaults did not have to cause so much destruction as they did.

The WannaCry attackers collected about 52.19666422 BTC, equivalent to USD 142,361.51 via 345 separate Bitcoin payments into their wallets, with just 6 withdrawals for executing the transaction.

Given such incidences, insurance policies associated with cyber attacks have the ability for facilitating educational tools for workers training to assist employees recognize phishing e-mails while execute the best practices associated with proactive strategy for spreading security awareness.

According to one Malwarebytes report, one SMB out of a batch of 6 struck with ransomware infection suffered over 25-hrs of business derailment whereas the rest experienced a maximum of 100-hrs (2.5 weeks) time when there was downtime. Whilst 75% of companies regard dealing with the problem with high priority, almost 50% indicated little confidence with respect to preventing such assaults. And prevention is uppermost, while utilizing tools like spam filtering, IDS, sandbox, anti-virus, threat intelligence applications along with frequent data back-ups will help companies fight back ransomware assaults.

» SPAMfighter News - 10/6/2017