This article, in the News Section of Dark Reading, which is a cybersecurity news platform, discusses the rising success of ransomware in a variety of industries, such as Healthcare, Entertainment, Energy, etc. Ransomware is an attack where the attacker holds the organization’s data/systems “hostage” until they are paid money. With rising successes, many cyber-criminals are getting away scot-free with a profit, due to the nature of anonymity on the internet, which encourages malicious actors to keep attacking, and this has created a huge loss in money for companies, with this loss becoming increasingly high. The average ransom is “topping $1.4 million and the average cost of recovery is more than $700,000 for organizations that did not pay a ransom.” Even local governments and schools are worried that they will be targeted, especially since having the money to reinstate the infrastructure in the case of a ransomware attack will be hard to come by for them. Companies can take preemptive action to prevent the attack and minimize response costs but that can be expensive for some companies and difficult to do. Greg Conti, principal consultant and co-founder of cybersecurity consultancy Kopidion, says, in the article, that “Often it comes down to, do we have backups? If you have a hardened cloud backup or an air-gapped backup system, then you can recover. And if you are not doing those things, then you have a major problem.” In the future, it will be important to focus on cybersecurity research, proactive actions, and government policies to decrease the successes that bad actors are having when they attack.
