INTELLIGENT SOFTWARE BUSINESS
How to avoid
being held
hostage by
ransomware
How can businesses guard against the rising
threat of ransomware asks Richard Agnew,
VP NW EMEA at Veeam Software.
Richard Agnew, VP NW EMEA at Veeam Software.
P
aying ransom fees to regain access
to data in the vague hope that
criminals will release files from
hostage is a known phenomenon that
continues to demand regular column
inches. But currently, with ransomware
on the rise, no company wants to get into
the habit of paying out a ransom fee to
access their own services. ‑Ransomware
threats reached an all-time high in 2016,
increasing by 752 per cent compared to
the previous year and resulting in £815
million in losses for businesses, according
to a study by Trend Micro and the Zero
Day Initiative. This came as the number
of ransomware families – including
variants known as Bit Crypt, CryptoWall,
Cerber and Jigsaw – increased from just
29 to 247 in the same time frame, while
research by the CyberEdge Group found
that nearly two thirds of organisations fell
victim to a ransomware attack during the
46
year. This begs the question – how can
businesses guard against the rising threat
of ransomware?
The rise of ransomware
The vital ingredient in ransomware’s
startling rise is money. The sheer size of
the reward available can convince even
people with impeccable moral standards
to commit a crime. Suddenly there is
a reason for rogue employees to take a
risk and those with intimate knowledge
of a company’s business processes can
purposely target systems containing
its most precious data to ensure the
organisation must pay; and pay big.
The other key factor here is that
malware has previously been something
only skilled hackers could create, but now
the ease of ransomware creation makes
the process almost effortless, making it a
simple task for, in theory, anyone with a
computer to drop the malware and wait
for the ransom pay-out. Indeed, a service
known as Satan on dark web portal Tor
allows anyone to create and configure a
variant of malware and choose from a
range of techniques, select a ransom note,
choose a contact preference and track the
amount of money they’ve made.
Trojan malware like Locky, TeslaCrypt
and CryptoLocker are the most commonly
used variations currently used to attack
companies. These often breach security
loopholes in web browsers and their
plugins or inadvertently opened email
attachments then, once inside the company,
the ransomware can spread at breakneck
speeds and begin to encrypt valuable data.
The FBI has recommended that companies
implement a solid ransomware backup and
recovery strategy for effective protection
against data loss caused by CryptoLocker or
any other Trojan.
Issue 10
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS