Every Business Is A Sitting Duck For Ransomware.
Since my wife’s company had to pay 10 million to regain access to their two companies design, manufacturing, ecommerce and logistics system, I wanted to learn more about what ransomware is and I also wanted to find out more about the programming, software behaviors that make ransomware so effective.
IML Services is an online marketing firm with clients big and small. The first thing that I was concerned about was my client’s vulnerability against ransomware.
What Is Ransomware?
In researching some resent ransomware attacks, including my wife’s direct involvement of an attack from “The Darkside”. I learned that ransomware is not a complicated program. It is a relatively easy programming concept that has been around for years. The entire program all starts as a file that needs to be downloaded and shared by company employees. Like a YouTube video that gets shared among employees. That file is most always sent from an untrusted source without a proper SSL certificate. Most browsers will even flag an incoming suspicious email. But those attachments still somehow get opened.
Ransomware is hard to stop once it starts. The program is out to look for passwords. Email passwords, hosting login, Registration passwords and it looks for consistency in password terminology. After a few months that program will suggest hundreds of password options and soon they hit paydirt and that program will find the all-important master admin password. The ransomware source like “Darkside” will move the server files to another host – delete all files and offer ransom to regain access to the server files.
When asked to “Darkside” by the hostage company, “Why are you doing this to us, we did nothing to you to deserve this”, Darkside replied, “This is a business, nothing personal… this is how we get paid”.
How To Be Prepared For A Ransomware Attack
It is really not rocket science in following steps to eliminate the threat of paying ransomware.
One thing to remember…Ransomware is not just for big companies; every business is a sitting duck for ransomware.
One of the biggest things you can do is educate your employees not to download any file on a company computer from an untrusted source. Simply reinforcing this concept is one of the best things you can do.
Avoiding ransomware can be expensive. The bigger the company the more bucks it will cost to avoid being held hostage by ransomware. Being locked out of your company sucks but holding another set of keys to the kingdom is a smart option that medium to large companies have to consider. Imagine finding out your company is shut down and operations come to a compete stop.
Ecommerce, CRM, emails, Website, everything is down. You get a call that for a fee, we will get you back up and running. But instead, you have been running a mirrored cloud base server on a private host outside of your closed system. In fact, this is a mirrored back up system that copies all company files and duplicated everything every night for the reason of disaster, virus attack or ransomware. Life is good when you are ready for such an attack.
If you want to learn more on how to prepare your company with a more robust backup program, contact IML Services 239-572-9234.
