At this point, if you’re not thinking about how to protect yourself against ransomware, you’re asking for failure. Examples can be found across every industry of companies that have found themselves victims, with even governments running into issues with their data being compromised and encrypted away, unless payments are made to the hackers, according to an article in Security Magazine. Attacks continue to climb in number, with estimates indicating ransomware-related data breaches growing by 41% over the last twelve months.
With these growing numbers, it’s only a matter of time before you find yourself a target, and how you weather the storm may depend on a very limited set of steps you can take to prepare yourself:
- Ensure you’ve got full cybersecurity coverage — don’t assume key or critical systems are fully protected, but instead deploy monitoring tools to ensure you’re watching all parts of your network
- Check regularly for new patches — vulnerabilities are being found regularly, and while zero-day attacks are hard to protect against, many organizations do find that hackers were able to use methods for which fixes were already available
- Regularly updating your business continuity plan — as attacks change, so should your plan, and this will require regular meetings, discussions, and testing sessions to ensure your business continuity plan is comprehensive, and ready to use
- Keep everyone engaged — make security awareness training mandatory and regular, to keep people aware of the common techniques that attackers may use to help gain access to networks.
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