June 25, 2020
As a follow, up to our earlier blog “Ransomware is becoming an increasingly common threat, that targets individuals, small business and well as large enterprises and governments. Within the last 5 weeks, 4 companies have reached out to Lanworks, with as few as 15, to large multinational 1,000+ employee organizations that have been attacked and compromised. As part of our experience in resolving these incidents, we can share the “real life” methodologies and sophisticated tactics used by the perpetrators. There is a common misconception that “it will never happen to me”, but in our experience ransomware is becoming pervasive”.
In present day, it’s getting crazy out there! Ransomware is becoming more and more prevalent, damaging and costly. We have seen a recent surge in malicious attacks and we cannot “stress” enough the importance of protecting your IT environment from malicious and costly attacks. For those who have encountered Ransomware “stress” – where the network is in effect idle – it affects various people in different ways, for example;
IT Manager/Director/CIO – uncertainty pertaining to the resolution, length of downtime, and working 24/7 to normalize the environment
Lanworks Personnel – working 24/7 with a Team dispatched onsite to review, rebuild/restore, and instituting proper security protocols to get the environment back to operational status
Business Owner/Manager
– loss of customer sales/services, business integrity and reputation
– business longevity concerns
– cost of resolution
Some questions for you to consider;
• What if your business was down from 5 days up to 3 weeks?
• What if your cost to resolution was from $20k to over $100k?
• What if you can’t recover?
• What if you actually paid the ransom and then got hit again?
• What can you do now to protect yourself from future attacks?
In taking a proactive stance, as we don’t want the “stress” either (as it places our staff in 911 mode) we created a “Ransomware Readiness/Prevention Audit” which looks at all aspects of your network environment.
To assist you in counteracting Ransomware, our analysis will provide you with an insight of your Network Operations and highlight any issues that may need to be addressed to mitigate potential security breaches, threats, attacks, and financial loss.
Lanworks will table the findings encompassing the following areas:
Active Directory and Passwords
Backups
Supported OS’s
Email
AntiVirus
Remote Access
Firewall
Wireless
Network
End User Education
A final report will be presented with expert recommendations, to lessen the risk of your business being threatened or attacked by ransomware.
