If you could design an attack that would be the most destructive, disruptive, and down right disheartening in 2020 it would be the ransomware attacks. These are no longer just in our news, but happening to our neighbors, businesses, and fellow colleagues.

Why is ransomware so dangerous? You are often the person that lets it into your system, and it silently waits, collecting information, until you are at your most vulnerable. So how does this even work? Originally published in Commercial Banking’s cybersecurity magazine, this infographic illustrates a ransomware attack. 

Ransomware can get in any number of ways, but phishing emails are the most common. Lately there have been other brute force attacks, and targeting of known vulnerabilities, but those are more uncommon and tend to target larger institutions. Cyber Defense Magazine reported that, “Eighteen million malware and phishing emails and more than 240 million COVID-19-related spam email messages are sent over Gmail daily.” Hackers are smart and after years of practice, they know the psychology of their victims and know how to take advantage of our fears...right now COVID-19 makes up a majority of the attacks. Hackers send out emails with a link that looks like the CDC, WHO, and other reliable institutions because psychologically that is who we trust.

Ransomware can spend hours to even months infecting systems and gathering information. Oftentimes antivirus software is disabled, or ineffective if it is not patched correctly. Depending upon how secure each component is in your business office, the ransomware may find a way into additional systems, servers or connected pieces of equipment. Architecting your system to protect itself and your data is an important step in prevention.

Unfortunately, by the time encryption is happening and you are aware of the infection, disaster recovery is your only alternative. The FBI is warning businesses not to pay ransoms as it encourages hackers to continue, however if you have not protected your systems from the start, it's hard to recover.

I recently did a webinar on disaster recover, specific to ransomware with my partner Synology. Although any one back up system is not foolproof, it is an extremely important part of your defense and recovery in the case of a ransomware attack. As the webinar covered, there are a lot of backup and disaster recovery systems, so looking at how the whole system is architected is important.

One thing I want to stress is that no matter what scary things are out there now or tomorrow, Siligent and our partners are here to help you through it all. We hope to be your trusted partner as we help you build a system that you can know and trust.