This week’s Sophos’ Naked Security newsletter discusses the results of The State of Ransomware 2020 global study commissioned by Sophos.
Unfortunately, it’s not good news, which shouldn’t be surprising.
Synopsis:
The study questioned 5000 IT managers from 26 countries, with 500 of them being from the U.S. So we’re not talking about a small sample size. Of those 5000, half had experienced a ransomware attack during 2019, despite increasing their security posture. One a quarter of them paid the ransom, usually initiated by their insurance company. Of those who paid the ransom, 94% got their data back.
Findings:
The most successful attacks still came through malicious file downloads and links, followed by remote server attacks. Other sources of attacks included USB drives and external vendors. aying the ransom ends up costing more than recovering data from backups.
Key Takeaways:
Though not mentioned in the article, I still believe that teaching employees about security, how to spot phishing and other malicious emails should be high on the list, if not at the very top of any successful security plan. Security is all about layered protections: firewalls, endpoint security, email filtering, web filtering, multi-factor authentication, and so on. But it only takes one email to make it through to an employee who will naively open the email and run the attachment to completely compromise your organization.
We invite you to email Golden Consulting or call (443-817-2869) to learn how to increase your organization’s cyber security so that we can begin protecting you against ransomware.
For the full Naked Security article, please see this link: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/05/12/huge-toll-of-ransomware-attacks-revealed-in-sophos-report/.
