Understanding ransomware and the impact of repeated attacks

 

We know ransomware is one of the greatest threats in cybersecurity currently, and we know that once your organization has been hit, you’re likely to be targeted again. But how much do we understand its impact?

To gain greater insight into the risks of repeated ransomware attacks, we took a look at The State of Endpoint Security Today. This report details the findings of a survey polling more than 2,700 IT decision-makers from mid-sized businesses across ten countries.

Despite the splash ransomware made in 2017, the survey found that organizations are still not fully prepared to face today’s rapidly-evolving threats.

What was the impact of ransomware in 2017? For starters, more than half of organizations surveyed were hit with a ransomware attack last year, most more than once. Traditional antivirus alone appears to be insufficient compared to an in-depth IT Services Florence SC, as 75% of the organizations surveyed were running up-to-date endpoint protection when the ransomware attack occurred.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the survey also found that ransomware attacks are expensive. The median total cost of an attack was $133,000 – not just the cost of the ransom, but lost hours, downtime, device and network costs, and lost opportunities. And when a business was hit hard, it got costly fast: 5% of respondents reported ransomware attacks that cost $1.3 to $6.6 million.

Arguably more telling than the ransomware statistics revealed by this report are the findings uncovered about exploits and anti-exploit technology. Nearly 70% of IT support Florence SC professionals weren’t able to correctly define anti-exploit technology, even while understanding that it is critical to prevent modern, evolving attacks.

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More than half of organizations don’t yet have anti-exploit technology, leaving them open to falling prey to these effective tactics by hackers.

There is a lack of understanding around predictive, next-generation technologies like machine or deep learning, with more than half (56%) admitting they don’t fully understand the differences between machine and deep learning. Though the understanding of the need for predictive, next generation technology is trending in the right direction – 60% of respondents are planning to implement such technology within a year – currently only 25% have such technology in place.

The state of endpoint protection and how current attacks are impacting users and administrators may be worrying, but we’ve got good news…

The latest version of Intercept X stops ransomware in its tracks, employs deep learning to identify malicious or potentially unwanted files without having ever seen them before and uses anti-exploit technology to block the techniques attackers use to control vulnerable software.

Find out more about our unmatched next-gen endpoint protection.

Call SpartanTec, Inc. now if you need to know more about our IT and computer security solutions. 

SpartanTec, Inc.
Florence, SC 29501
843-396-8762
http://manageditservicesflorence.com

Serving: Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Wilmington, Fayetteville, Florence

The Challenge of Securing IoT

 

By now, everyone has heard the numbers. Internet of Things is part of a networking revolution that is transforming the world. Cybersecurity experts predict that by 2020 there will be over 33 billion IoT devices deployed, or 4.3 Internet-connected devices for every man, woman, and child on the planet.

Of course, IoT is more than just one thing. There are a variety of IoT devices and categories, each with their own implications.

Consumer IoT includes the connected devices we are most familiar with, such as smart cars, phones, watches, laptops, connected appliances, and entertainment systems.

Commercial IoT includes things like inventory controls, device trackers, and connected medical devices.

Industrial IoT covers such things as connected electric meters, waste water systems, flow gauges, pipeline monitors, manufacturing robots, and other types of connected industrial devices and systems.

The implications for networks, and especially cybersecurity Florence SC, are huge.

Increasingly, IoT devices are being woven into local, national, and global networks, including critical infrastructures, creating hyperconnected environments of transportation, water, energy, communications, and emergency systems. Healthcare agencies, refineries, agriculture, manufacturing, government agencies, and even smart buildings and cities all use IoT devices to automatically track, monitor, coordinate, and respond to events.

While automating decisions and processes at machine speeds can generate revenue, improve our quality of life, make us more productive, and even save lives, it also introduces new risks and widens the threat landscape.

1. Some of the data passing from, to, or between connected devices contains personal information that can be exploited, including locations, names and addresses, ordering and billing information, credit card and bank information, medical records, government-issued ID numbers, etc.

2. When compromised IoT devices are connected to ITnetworks, they can become a conduit for breaches or the injection of malware.

3. Compromised Industrial and Commercial IoT devices can be used to make changes on the manufacturing floor. Operations technology, SCADA, and industrial control systems actually control physical systems, not just the bits and bytes of traditional IT networks, and even the slightest tampering can sometimes have far-reaching - and potentially devastating - effects.

4. Increasingly, IoT is also being integrated into our critical infrastructure. Transportation systems, chemical refineries, wastewater systems, energy grids, culinary water, and communications systems all use IoT devices. The cascading effect of a serious compromise can be potentially catastrophic.

The challenge is that many IoT devices were never designed with security in mind. IoT security challenges include weak authentication and authorization protocols, insecure software, firmware with hard-coded back doors, poorly designed connectivity and communications, and little to no configurability. And most IoT devices are “headless,” with limited power and processing capabilities. This not only means they can’t have security clients installed on them, but most can’t even be patched or updated.

The risk is real. Just last fall, compromised IoT devices were gathered into a massive botnet, causing the largest denial of service outage in history. Unfortunately, the general response by the security industry has been woefully inadequate. Sure, the expo floor at this year’s RSA conference is filled with vendors promoting devices and tools to sooth the IoT worries of organizations.

The problem is that the network teams that need to test, deploy, manage, and monitor these devices are already overwhelmed. Dozens of isolated devices with separate management interfaces have placed a strain on limited IT resources. Large enterprises already need to manage an average of 30 security consoles, connected to hundreds of security devices that usually operate in isolation. This makes gathering threat intelligence a cumbersome and time-consuming task, often requiring the hand correlation of telemetry data in order to identify malware or compromised systems.

And now, specialized security tools being created and promoted for IoT are going to expand the number of deployed hardware-based and virtual security devices even further.

The reality is, IoT cannot be treated and secured as an isolated, independent network. It interacts across your existing extended network, including endpoint devices, cloud, traditional and virtual IT, and OT. Isolated IoT security strategies simply increase overhead and reduce broad visibility. Instead, security teams need to be able to tie together and cross-correlate what is happening across their IT, OT, IoT, and cloud networks. Such an approach enables visibility across this entire ecosystem of networks, allowing the network to automatically collect and correlate threat intelligence and orchestrate real-time responses to detected threats.

This requires a rethinking your security strategy. A distributed and integrated security architecture needs to cover your entire networked ecosystem, expand and ensure resilience, secure compute resources and workloads, and provide routing and WAN optimization.

The Fortinet Security Fabric solves the challenge of security sprawl by integrating your security infrastructure together into a single, holistic framework. This allows you to effectively monitor legitimate traffic, including IoT devices, check authentication and credentialing, and impose access management across your distributed environment through an integrated, synchronized, and automated security architecture managed through a single pane of glass.

In addition to our innovative Security Fabric solution, Fortinet is actively driving the development of IoT-specific security solutions. We already hold dozens of issued and pending IoT security patents that complement our industry-leading patent portfolio and have been woven seamlessly into out Security Fabric framework. Our commitment to innovation helps ensure that Fortinet continually delivers the most advanced security solutions designed to help organizations defend against the continually evolving threat landscape that threatens the success of their digital business and the emerging digital economy.

 

Call SpartanTec, Inc. now for more information about our security solutions and managed IT services. 

SpartanTec, Inc.
Florence, SC 29501
843-396-8762
http://manageditservicesflorence.com

Serving: Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Wilmington, Fayetteville, Florence

Your #1 MUST-DO Resolution For 2021

 Bingo Madness Happy Hour

Join Unitrends and SpartanTec for a little fun and learn a little about backup and disaster recovery - and maybe even about March Madness and St Patrick's Day too!

WED, MAR 10 AT 4 PM EST

Register: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_avks5CACR7e0adU8kbapoQ

With every New Year comes the chance to reset priorities. Unfortunately, when the topic of implementing a data recovery plan comes up, the comment we most often hear is “I know I should, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet…”

So…what if the pilot on the next flight you’re on announces right after takeoff, “I know we should have run through our preflight checklist, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet…”???

Without a solid backup and recovery plan in place, just one mission-critical file that gets lost or stolen could put your company in a world of serious hurt. When you compare the high cost of replacement, repair and recovery to the relatively trivial price of keeping good backups, the choice is an absolute no-brainer.

 

Why disaster recovery planning matters more than you think

Let’s face it, data is the nucleus of your business. That means that a single ransomware attack could wipe you out in a matter of minutes. Today’s cybercriminals are raking in literally billions of dollars (yes, billions) preying on the unwary, the poorly protected and those who “haven’t gotten around to it yet.” Let’s consider the facts…

Ninety-seven percent of IT service Florence SC providers surveyed by Datto, a data protection company, report that ransomware attacks on businesses are becoming more frequent, and they expect that trend to continue. These attacks are taking place despite anti-virus and anti-malware measures in effect at the time of the attack.

Windows operating systems are most often infected, followed by OS X. Cloud-based applications, particularly Dropbox, Office 365 and Google Apps, are also being targeted.

Ransom demands typically run between $500 and $2,000. About 10%, however, exceed $5,000. And even at that, paying a ransom demand is no guarantee that encrypted files will be released.

For a typical SMB, downtime from ransomware can cost around $8,500 per hour, and will take an average of 18.5 hours of the company’s time. That’s a hit to your bottom line somewhere in the neighborhood of $157,250. Yet in many cases the ultimate cost has reached into multiple hundreds of thousands.

In a recent survey of 6,000 IT professionals by the Ponemon Institute, 86% of companies had one or more incidents causing downtime in the past 12 months. Typical downtime was 2.2 days, with an average cost of $366,363. And that’s just the average. 

Could your company survive that kind of hit? It’s no wonder that 81% of smaller businesses suffering such an attack close their doors within three years.

It’s tragic. And yet the solution is so simple…

 The #1 antidote for a data disaster

What’s behind these costly incidents? Here’s the breakdown of contributing factors:

• Human error: 60%
• Unexpected updates and patches: 56%
• Server room environment issues: 44%
• Power outages: 29%
• Fire or explosion: 26%
• Natural disasters: 10%

Note that human error accounts for 60% of the breaches. It’s no wonder then that ransomware attacks are on the rise, since they can be triggered by just one employee inadvertently clicking a bad link in an e-mail or social media site. Human behavior is hard to control. However, the #1 antidote for a ransomware attack is having a secure backup ready and waiting to replace encrypted files.

And when you scan through the rest of the list above, it becomes clear that, while you need to implement a comprehensive set of data security measures, having a solid and reliable data recovery plan in place and ready to go the moment disaster strikes is still your best defense.

Call SpartanTec, Inc. now and know more about our backup and data recovery services. 

SpartanTec, Inc.
Florence, SC 29501
843-396-8762
http://manageditservicesflorence.com

Serving: Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Wilmington, Fayetteville, Florence