The time at ML:0 can be eye-opening form many organizations. There are generally a lot of assets discovered that are new or had been forgotten about. Almost every organization discovers their own Methuselah; this is the system that has been around forever and performs some important tasks but has not been updated in years. The system admins are scared to touch it for fear of breaking something.
Normally it works like this. Someone gets infected by ransomware, and then they pay the ransom. The victim then licks their wounds and hopefully learns something from the experience. And that’s what happened to Tobias Frömel, a German developer and web designer who found himself paying a Bitcoin ransom of 670 Euros (US $735) after his QNAP NAS drive was hit by the Muhstik ransomware.
In the digital age, more often than not, you can be sure that some enterprise has hold of your personal information. This information could be your name, email, phone number, IP address, country and other details. This can come from submitting a form, subscribing to a newsletter, accepting cookies, accepting the privacy policy or terms and conditions when creating an account or downloading software.
Digital attackers are increasingly targeting industrial environments these days. Take manufacturing organizations, for instance. Back in late-August, FortiGuard Labs discovered a malspam campaign that had targeted a large U.S. manufacturing company with a variant of the LokiBot infostealer family. It wasn’t long thereafter when Bloomberg reported on the efforts of bad actors to target Airbus by infiltrating its suppliers’ networks.
Phishing attacks don’t show any sign of slowing down. Per its 2019 Phishing Trends and Intelligence Report, PhishLabs found that total phishing volume rose 40.9 percent over the course of 2018. These attacks targeted a range of organizations, especially financial service companies, email and online service providers and cloud/file hosting firms.
If I asked you what security products you had in place to manage your risk within your IT organisation 10 years ago, you’d probably have been able to list a half dozen different tools and confidently note that most of your infrastructure was covered by a common set of key products such as antivirus, DLP, firewalls, etc. But in a world with IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, maintaining a comprehensive approach becomes far more difficult.
For many organizations moving to the cloud, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) like AWS EC2, Azure Virtual Machines or Google Compute Engine often forms the backbone of their cloud architecture. These services allow you to create instances of pretty much any operating system almost instantly. Unfortunately, moving your IT infrastructure to the cloud doesn’t relieve you of your compliance or security obligations.
As ransomware attacks continue to cripple networks, most recently forcing medical centres to shut down their systems and turn away patients, the FBI has issued some unambiguous advice for organisations on how they should handle ransom demands: Don’t pay.
