Ransomware has dominated the cybersecurity landscape in 2017, with organizations of every size being impacted, shelling out millions of dollars to free hijacked files and data.  Mega ransomware attacks such as Petya/NotPetya, WannaCry and more recently, BadRabbit, have created havoc throughout the world impacting every sector including financial, healthcare, government, legal firms and others.

Cyber thieves have become more sophisticated and have increased their use of ransomware tools that can be purchased over the dark web and other dubious sites.  A single attack in 2017 is believed to have launched more than 2-million attempted ransomware infiltrations every hour.

Some facts about ransomware:

  • The average ransom demand in recent ransomware families is approximately $544 (Symantec)
  • The US is still the country most affected by ransomware, followed by Japan, Italy, India, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, Russia, and Canada (Symantec)
  • Ransomware shuts down 1 in 5 small businesses after it hits (CNET)
  • Global ransomware damage costs to are set to surpass $5-billion in 2017 (CSO Online)

Traditional perimeter defenses such as anti-virus are not enough to block ransomware. The most effective way to mitigate the risk of ransomware is to prevent unknown applications from gaining the read, write and edit permissions needed to encrypt files. Proactive measures can be taken before a threat becomes reality.

The Cynet 360 platform is a comprehensive cyber security solution which provides organizations with all the capabilities necessary to detect and remediate threats like ransomware.  In fact, we are proud to say that Cynet has detected and remediated the major ransomware attacks that occurred this year including WannaCry, Petya/NotPetya and BadRabbit.