Introducing the Practical Guide on Ransomware

As a follow-up to our recent foray into ransomware, we’re pleased to offer a fundamental practical guide on how to deal with ransomware.

Entitled “Could your business survive a cryptor”, it specifically describes what an encrypting ransomware is, what damage it can inflict, and how to counter this threat, which tends to be quite sophisticated at times.

Cryptors affect both consumers and entire businesses, and in the latter case the ransom demanded tends to be much higher.

The problem is that these bigger payments may only represent a small portion of the overall cost to the business: repercussions of an attack may include lost sales, reduced productivity, significant costs for system recovery, and, overall continuity disruption. A permanent loss of the data – i.e. when files stay encrypted and no backups are available – can have much more severe consequences, such as permanent damage to the company’s competitive position, reduction of sales revenues over the long term, and others, including going out of business – simply because of a single act of hi-tech extortion.

The number of cryptor attacks grows quickly: ransomware has proven itself as a good source of illicit gain, so it’s no surprise there are more and more criminals willing to earn money that way.

Ransomware may differ in quality and efficiency, but even the FBI recommends paying ransom if a company gets hit with top-notch cryptors such as CryptoWall.

According to a survey conducted by the University of Kent’s Interdisciplinary Research Center in Cyber Security, in February 2014, over 40% of CryptoLocker victims agreed to pay the ransom.

And despite the growing threat, just 40% of businesses consider ransomware to be a serious threat. Obviously, this attitude can lead to security weaknesses that can be exploited by cybercriminals, the report says.