Video Friday: Are You Protected Against Cyber Threats?
Lessons to be learned from a recent hack of a local government’s systems.
According to The Washington Post, “the best that officials in Plainfield, N.J., can tell, the hackers got in when someone was on the Internet researching grants, and soon employees in the mayor’s office were locked out of their own files. City officials scrambled to pull servers offline, but three had been compromised, leaving memos, city newsletters and other documents inaccessible.
The culprits said they would release the files, but only if the city coughed up about 650 euros, paid in bitcoin, Mayor Adrian Mapp said. When the city instead turned to law enforcement, he said, the hackers vanished.”
We can’t stress enough that ransomware is on the rise, targeting new industries constantly. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can’t be affected. This form of malware gets into people’s computers, most likely because they click on a link or open an attachment in an email. It then encrypts files or otherwise locks users out until they pay for the key.. if they hold up their end of the deal.
What is worse is, more and more victims are paying, which is causing this criminal empire to grow and become more powerful. Ransomware has been around for some time, but until recently, there has never been so much effort put forth by these criminals to break into a network and wait around for a while until they can spread it to all devices and install it everywhere.
“The ransom demands are often relatively small — hundreds or thousands of dollars — and the compromised data is important. But the disruption to a business, especially if it has not backed up the data, can be significant,” says The Washington Post. Vertilocity agrees. We know the cost of downtime is high, and if not backed up, your organization can lose everything. The best thing you can do to protect your company is to educate yourself on what is going on and how to prevent it, and make sure you have the right systems in place to back your data up, should you be attacked.
With these attacks, the hackers are getting into systems and sticking around for months to years before they strike. Don’t make the mistake of letting them in, and then allowing them to attack when you could have detected and prevented the whole thing. And we also agree with the FBI’s warning to not pay these ransomes.. just like any other company, if they are not making money, they will go out of business. Plus as we have said before, don’t put your trust in a criminal’s hands.
On another note, these hackers are also demanding payment in Bitcoin, which is nearly impossible to track. Find out a little bit more about Bitcoin in the video below.