Cisco Mid-year Security Report - Webroot Insight
July 2017 by David Kennerley, director of threat research at Webroot
The comment from David Kennerley, Director of Threat Research at Webroot:
“Ransomware as a service is without a doubt one of the biggest threats facing organisations across industries today, and protection against ransomware is currently a question of economics.”
Due to poor security practices and culture in many cases it often seen to be cheaper to pay the ransom to get the data back than through internal recovery procedures. No matter how tempting it might be, if any other options exists, however challenging, companies should never negotiate or concede to criminal and pay the ransom. The danger with paying the ransom is there’s no guarantee they’ll recover the encrypted files, and by paying you are only fuelling the ransomware economy – and what now stops you being targeted again in future cyberattacks?. Also be aware that ransomware by its very nature is designed be annoying and loud, be mindful that there may also be secondary infections intent on staying hidden, looking to perform damage using other means – like data and password pilfering.”
“Organisations and individuals need to ensure that firstly, adequate defences are in place. And secondly, valuable data is always backed up so systems can be restored if need be. It also goes without saying that organisations should test their disaster recovery plan (DRP) regularly. This will help them understand the time it will take to restore systems to a useable state and what data is likely to be lost due to back up schedules.”