RANSOMWARE STRAIN ATTACK PENETRATION


Cyber security company Datto notes that SamSam is ‘small but mighty’: ‘The City of Atlanta was rocked from a SamSam attack’. The strain also made its way to Indiana’s healthcare industry, and Colorado’s transportation system. In July 2018, it was estimated that SamSam hackers had netted around €5.3m.


CRYPTOLOCKER WANNACRY CRYPTOWALL LOCKY CRYPTXXX PETYA TESTACRYPT CBT LOCKER NOTPETYA


TORRENT LOCKER BAD RABBIT CRYSIS COINVAULT CERBER SAMSAM


6%


5% 5% 3%


policy that devolves responsibility for defence beyond the IT department and out to the frontline workforce – and that includes everyone, from senior executive to temporary staff . Getting this right is acutely important in respect to avoiding ransomware, because its success mostly depends on an employee inadvertently enabling the ransomware to get into a company’s IT network. SentinelOne’s Global Ransomware Study 2018, for instance,


found that with around half of respondents whose organisation had suff ered a ransomware attack in the last 12 months, the attack worked because an employee was careless (51%) and/or anti-virus was in place, but did not stop the ransomware attack (45%). This latter factor is echoed by Sophos’s SophosLabs 2019 Threat Report: it found that 75% of companies infected with ransomware were, nonetheless, running up-to-date endpoint protection software. The fi nancial cost to targeted businesses is another determinant


that might – in the short term, at least – lead some organisations to the view that they are actually better-off paying ransoms than spending their money on defensive measures that do not seem able to fully protect them. In employee terms, the word ‘careless’ (re. the SentinelOne study fi ndings) is perhaps used a little pejoratively. Training must keep up with the latest threats, which continually fi nd ways to con even suspicious staff to click when they should shun. For business owners it’s also important to be mindful of how


factors like staff churn bear on cyber security. This might well cause a shift in cyber security spending from technology to training, as organisations strive to reduce their ‘human exposure’ by coaching their staff to be more cyber attack-savvy. A dilemma for employers is that they are likely not to want to expend on advanced security awareness training for temporary workers – many of who, in 2019’s commercial climate, are likely to be placed in the cyber security frontline in terms of dealing with digital customer interaction that exposes them to phishing attacks, for example.


IN BRIEF ATTACKS ON CLOUD The Massachusetts Institute of


Technology’s prediction that one of 2018’s big cyber threat targets would be cloud computing service providers – which host almost incalculable volumes of critical data for client companies – doubtless caused many of those service providers to redouble their safeguards. For ransomware attackers to crack into a cloud service provider’s system would be equivalent in impact to launching thousands of ransomware attacks simultaneously. The outcome would be devastating:


tens of thousands of organisations that have migrated their data to third- party cloud would be compromised in near-perpetuity, unless decryption could be deployed at massive scale. Ransomware innovators have already had success in aiming attacks via cloud-based business applications, such as Microsoft Offi ce 365.


OVER: CYBER STRIKES MAPPED LIVE


ACCREDITATION Words | James Hayes Photography | Shutterstock


71% 50% 40% 24% 18% 17% 14%


11% 9%


8% 7%


AN INCREASE OF 17% ON PREVIOUS YEAR


AN INCREASE OF 1% ON PREVIOUS YEAR


49% REPORT O365 INFECTIONS 22% REPORT G SUITE INFECTIONS


RANSOMWARE CREEPS INTO CLOUD


Some 28% of managed service providers have seen ransomware attacks in Software- as-a-Service applications, such as Microsoft Offi ce 365 and Google G Suite; of these...


Sources: Datto State of Channel Ransomware Report 2018


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