The latest data from Coveware shows increases across the board in ransoms, downtime, and average cost of an attack, mostly due to the increased use of the Ryuk ransomware variant.
Ransomware attacks are particularly bothersome, as they not only take up IT’s time to remediate, but they also impact an organization’s productivity and wallet. According to Coveware’s Q1 Ransomware Marketplace Report in just three-month’s time, ransomware has taken an upturn in every aspect of the attack – changes definitely worth noting.
According to the report, three strains (Ryuk, Bitpaymer, and Iencrypt) have caused the rise in the cost of addressing a ransomware attack. Looking at Q1 2019 over Q4 2018, the following trends have appeared:
The good news is 96% of organizations paying the ransom received a working decryption tool.
Most ransomware attacks are the result of social engineering and/or phishing attacks. Educating users to spot these types of attacks using Security Awareness Training will help to significantly reduce the likelihood of initial attack success and, therefore, ransomware infection. If not social engineering, they are RDP attacks which you need to mitigate as well.
Five Things You Can Do About This Right Away:
Bad guys are constantly coming out with new malware versions to evade detection. That’s why we’ve updated our Ransomware Simulated tool “RanSim” to include a new cryptomining scenario!
This new cryptomining scenario simulates a Monero cryptocurrency-mining operation on the local machine. Monero mining is the most popular cryptocurrency mined by real-world malware and takes a lot of CPU and GPU cycles to process the data necessary to generate the currencies.
Try KnowBe4’s NEW Ransomware Simulator tool and get a quick look at the effectiveness of your existing network protection against the latest threats.
RanSim will simulate 13 ransomware infection scenarios and 1 cryptomining infection scenario to show you if a workstation is vulnerable to infection.
Here's how RanSim works:
This is a complementary tool and will take you 5 minutes max. RanSim may give you some insights about your endpoint security you never expected!
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