WHAT IS RANSOMWARE?

Ransomware is a malicious software, which financially motivated criminals use to attack your data.

If they successfully infiltrate your system, the ransomware begins to encrypt files so you can no longer access them. This process doesn’t alter the file names, so it is hard to see which files have been corrupted and which haven’t. 4% of data lost in an attack is unrecoverable (Source: Gartner).

They then hold this information hostage, demanding payment for its return. The average cost of a ransomware attack is €150k (Source: Gartner). Many leading antivirus software solutions are unable to detect new variants of ransomware for up to 4 weeks. And with attacks corrupting up to 7000 files per minute, the consequences can be disastrous.

HOW DOES AN ATTACK AFFECT YOUR BUSINESS?

If a ransomware attack takes hold of your data,
they will demand money.

This leads to a very difficult problem – do you pay up? This might avoid reputational damage, but it will fund further attacks and in all likelihood the attackers won’t relent. Or do you refuse? This will mean spending a fortune on new equipment, disruption of your everyday activity and may affect how people see your business.

There is a third option. Take the fight to ransomware before you get attacked by installing a containment-based solution.

HOW HAVE OTHER BUSINESSES BEEN AFFECTED?

Some recent well documented examples:

NHS
2017 saw an attack on a governmental scale, including 40 UK NHS hospitals. Yet, despite this first attack taking place in 2017, there have been several more attacks since and the threat of ransomware is still continuing to increase.

Eurofins
Eurofins Scientific – the UK’s biggest forensic services provider – was also hit by an attack in 2019. This highly-sophisticated strain of malicious software-led British police to suspend work within the company, as a massive backlog of 20,000 samples was built up.

Travelex
More recently was the cyber-attack on Travelex. The initial attack cost over $200 million and shut the entire network down for 14 days before they could get their systems back online. They further went on to lose over $47 million in revenue, took a huge hit to their reputation and in turn affected their global partners such as HSBC.