Ransomware Continues to Be Top of Mind in News
As I’m working from home on a Friday afternoon, I was checking my Yahoo! to see what’s going on in the world. The lead story is $24M ransomware bill the tip of the iceberg(link is external). The article highlights recent information provided by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security. Some of the data points are eye opening!
- The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received 7,700 public complaints about ransomware since 2005.
- These complaints had total damages of $57.6 million with ransoms paid ranging between $200 and $10,000.
- In 2015, victims paid over $24 million across 2,500 cases.
- On top of these incidents reported by the public, federal, state, and local governments have also experienced significant issues.
The DOJ also indicated that the most sophisticated strains of ransomware are practically impossible to defeat without getting hackers’ private decryption keys. Given this, the FBI is focusing its efforts around educating the public on prevention. The article also outlines that while prevention may be the best cure, it’s hard when defenses don’t work underscoring the ineffectiveness of the U.S. government’s EINSTEIN security system. The issue with EINSTEIN is consistent with other traditional security detection technologies in that they focus on known threats and are less effective for unknown threats.
The ransomware problem is only going to get worse in my opinion. The best thing organizations can do today is to educate users and make sure you are consistently backing up your data.
Over the remainder of 2016, I expect security vendors to release with new capabilities to help address detecting and stopping ransomware.
At Hexis Cyber Solutions, our researchers have been working on some interesting capabilities around ransomware prevention. Given the severity of the ransomware issue, we are looking for ways to accelerate bringing this capability to market.
Stay tuned!
- See more at: https://www.hexiscyber.com/news/hot-topics/ransomware-continues-be-top-mind-news#sthash.vExLgVRh.dpuf
Information Technology Executive & Success Driver | 15+ Years of IT Leadership, including CIO, CPO, CTO & Director-Level Roles | Deep Background in Cybersecurity | Proven Success in Growth, Turnaround & Value Creation
8 年Todd, you should take a look at our tech before you make that mass blanket statement. Let's us show you and then you could make an informed decision on recent/current technology and not base it off what others have put out there in the past. You are correct; but that was then and not now and not our tech. Let's connect on linkedin and then call me and I'll show you.
A liar is pretty aggressive Clay! Would never say that. Whitelisting is clearly an effective solution. Unfortunately it's proven to be a niche market as its too restrictive and painful to manage for mass deployments. Said another way could for endpoints focused on specific tasks (i.e. POS terminals) but not good for my laptop. Honestly I don't see this ever changing. It's also why Bit 9 bought Carbon Black.
Vice President of Enterprise Sales at White Cloud Security, LLC.
8 年Sorry, I am having issues sending you comment. I know you think I am a lier if I told you White Cloud Security can stop 100% of ransomware. That is the same thing the former Commander of Air Force Intel and the NSA said as well as the former CTO of Symantec as well as the former EVP of Symantec said but they all when to alpha.whitecloudsecurity.com/go/start-your-pilot-trail it is free!