The bad guys are serious, sophisticated and making a lot of money by holding data hostage. Here are a few important things to know about the Ransomware problem:
- Ransomware generates more money annually than the total value of many security technology companies. Cryptowall 3.0 made roughly $325 million USD from U.S. based victims in 2015
- The amount of ransom required will fluctuate based on the thieve’s perceived value of your data
- Our firewall vendor, SonicWALL, is currently stopping up to 80 million ransomware attempts each month
Despite a growing number of signatures (identified and blocked instances) against ransomware, the problem still as prevalent as ever. Ransomware authors keep changing their code and repackaging their threats to evade detection.
In October alone, we have had two different clients hit with ransomware viruses. One client was hit twice! In both cases, they are not hosted in our data center nor managed by our IT team. Nevertheless, we spent a significant amount of support time assisting the local IT vendors and our clients to get back up and running.
It is important to be cautious and overly protective of your environment. Do NOT open an email in question. If you have a bad feeling just delete the email, contact the sender and ask them if they intended to send you the previous email. Odds are they don’t even know they are sending out a virus either.