As we head to Las Vegas for Black Hat 2019 this week, I think our industry needs to re-focus on the fact that ransomware still presents a significant threat, and that our current approaches to thwarting that threat are not working.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the ransomware attacks against three Florida cities that cost at least one person their job. Since then, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards was forced to activate a state of emergency after ransomware took down three school districts’ IT systems, and a separate attack bricked laptops installed in Georgia state police vehicles.
I don’t know the specifics of each case — maybe the Florida municipal employee who was fired acted negligently and the firing is justified. But as I wrote in a recent article for ITSP Magazine, these cases remind me of a line in the climactic scene of the classic horror movie “The Exorcist” – and the key lesson it holds for all security professionals.
The article is up now, check it out here: “What “The Exorcist” Teaches Us About Ransomware Attacks.”
