Only with a good IT strategy with a proactive security strategy and a proactive disaster recovery plan you can increase your chances of withstanding a ransomware attack. Discover how.
As you might have read in the news, major companies in Belgium have been hit by a ransomware attack lately. For one company it has had such an impact that a thousand employee's were left technically unemployed for at least 2 days.
Besides the fact that such an attack is a catastrophe regarding security, the economic impact can be of such a scale that it can simply put you out of business.
The longer the time you need to recover from an attack, the bigger damage to your reputation, the bigger the chance for legal issues and the greater effects will be for your revenue loss and your productivity.
Rate of Ransomware Attacks
Some statistics of Rate of Ransomware Attacks:
- Ransomware was estimated a 2 Billion dollar business by the end of 2017
- Ransomware costs businesses more than $8 billion per year.
- The average cost of a ransomware attack on businesses was $133,000. (Source: Sophos)
- 75% of companies infected with ransomware were running up-to-date endpoint protection. (Source: Sophos)
- A new organization will fall victim to ransomware every 14 seconds in 2019, and every 11 seconds by 2021. (Source: Cybersecurity Ventures)
- 1.5 million new phishing sites are created every month (Source: webroot)
- Ransomware attacks have increased over 97 percent in the past two years. (Source: Phishme)
- A total of 850.97 million ransomware infections were detected by the institute in 2018.
- 34% of businesses hit with malware took a week or more to regain access to their data (Source: PhishMe)
- In 2019 ransomware from phishing emails increased 109 percent over 2017. (Source: PhishMe)
How to set up your perimeter strategy?
Only with a good IT strategy with a proactive security strategy and a proactive disaster recovery plan you can increase your chances of withstanding a ransomware attack.
It consists out of the following steps:
Education
The Education of your employees is your first line of defense.
More detailed information about this approach is found on these blogs:
- Why ransomware should concern you
- Ransomware is it still a threat?
- Phishing: 10 lifesaving tips to keep your mailbox safe
Front-Line Protection
This is the defense line towards the internet. It consists out of multiple components:
- Content & Anti-spam Filtering, scan all incoming & outgoing mail traffic. More detailed information about this can be found on this blog.
- Gateway Antivirus, scan all HTTP traffic from the internet.
- Keeping your systems up to date with the latest firmware & signatures is important, have a patching strategy in place.
- Monitoring your network, you need to know what is living on your network. Nobody has time to check the event logs of network equipment. This can all be automated by using modern tools.
- Regularly scan your network and systems on vulnerabilities. Using the correct tools give you a good insight on what is vulnerable. Something that was OK two weeks ago, might today be vulnerable because a new exploit has been discovered.
Stay tuned for next weeks topic: End Point & Server Protection Strategy
We have experts available that are able to assist you with the best practices for each line of defense.
Contact us to see how EASI can share our experience and help you to implement the correct security strategy!
