Verizon Wireless in its latest Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) has confirmed that ransomware has become the most popular form of malware in 2017 and has doubled up in existence in the past couple of years.
What’s more apprehending is that firms are still not investing in security strategies to tackle ransomware. Meaning they are left with no option other than to pay the demanded ransom by cybercriminals.
Verizon DBIR analyzed over 53,000 security incidents including 2,215 data breaches and concluded that 39% of attacks were related to ransomware when it comes to malware specific incidents.
The trend which is being followed by cyber crooks is that they are showing a lot of interest in targeting critical systems related to business than just attacking desktops. Means, hackers or ransomware authors are showing more interest in disrupting servers as encrypting a file server or database is more damaging than a single user’s device. And taking it on economic scale damaging a company server will obviously generate more profit and in some cases 1000%-2000% revenue than infecting an individual desktop with ransomware.
Verizon says that organizations can tackle the situation by educating users, patching their systems on a regular note and taking adequate security measures to isolate their IT assets from malware attacks. On an additional note, automated threat detection, timely & reliable backups and applying common sense where it is relevant will also help companies and individuals save themselves from data loss during ransomware attacks.
