Is your organization vulnerable to devastating attacks – and you don’t know it?
While you go about your business day, customers call, transactions are finalized, receivables are flowing, products are shipped, and your teams are producing. All is good in your world and your company’s health is the envy of your peers. But you’re unaware of the massive blind spot that will bring down your company next week.
In today’s business environment nearly everything we do – marketing, sales, engineering, production, receiving, shipping – is affected by our computers. They make our lives more productive, more precise, but they have a weakness. If anything in your business relies on a server, if you are marketing your offerings on a website, or communicate with your customers via email, you are vulnerable to being a hostage of the cybercriminal.
When you imagine a cybercriminal, what comes to mind?
Often, it’s criminal experts with a profit motive, leveraging vulnerabilities in software and configurations to escalate their access taking over key aspects of your cyber infrastructure. Once they do, they have broad control of your organization. With this control a cybercriminal performs a number of activities such as fraud, data theft, and most devastatingly, deploying ransomware. They have you.
In fact, according to the Verizon 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report a full 24% of all breaches this year impacting the manufacturing sector in were ransomware attacks, an increase of 13% in one year, as big a rise as the last five years combined! Ransomware is seen more and more often, as the prevalence of ransomware-as-a-service and rent-a-ransomware toolkits become available to the bad actor. The efficiency of ransomware deployment makes it easier than ever for attackers to monetize access to your critical services, whether by using a third-party ransomware toolkit and playbook, or by auctioning off their access to specialized ransomwaring groups.
The impact of a ransomware deployment is severe: a good attacker will ensure that before the business is alerted to their situation, as many backups and recovery capabilities as possible have been destroyed or otherwise rendered useless. In a well-executed campaign when the ransom demand is finally presented to the business, they will find it impossible to fully recover access to critical data without paying the attackers. Depending on the business and the extent to which the attackers were able to prepare, downtime can last anywhere from weeks to months as businesses try to recover or rebuild critical infrastructure, to recover necessary data on their own and only come back up once they pay the ransom. The required effort to rebuild the environment even (and especially) after paying the ransom is massive. Depending on the size of the environment it may be impossible to guarantee all the attacker’s persistence methods have been identified and removed. Furthermore, the financial and reputational impact of the hack and extended downtime compounded with the ransom payment have driven many organizations to bankruptcy.
So, how does an organization defend itself from such an incident?
There are various strategies to employ to prevent intrusion – too many to explain in this text – however, once the attacker reveals themselves, the best defense is to render them useless. Your team should have a backup solution from which to restore your operational systems. There are many types: airgapped on-prem backups, cloud only, and virtual that employ a variety of backup software solutions. All have their vulnerabilities. At PEAK IT Security & Solutions, we recommend to our customers a unique immutable cross-platform data protection system that offers fast reliable backups and rapid recovery in a single product with impossible to corrupt cloud redundancy.
In the world of cybersecurity, prevention is paramount, and preparation is defense.
Reach out and ask one of our cybersecurity professionals about how immutable backups can offer peace of mind and operational longevity for your organization. Or visit us as PEAKITSS.com to learn more.
