Network Solutions Unlimited Blog

Let’s have a little fun today. Today’s blog post is written in the format of a daytime soap opera. Please make sure you read all of the dialogue as if being whispered by extremely attractive television stars and starlets!

Life goes on in the small town of Oak Falls, deep woods surrounding the little hamlet nestled on the coast of Cape Seguridad. Let’s follow the lives of some of the residents, their lives Of Vice… and Vulnerability.

We’ve spent the last few weeks discussing ransomware's impacts on different subsets. First, we discussed how a ransomware attack impacts the customers of the infected business, and then we touched on the infected business itself. To end, we want to touch on ransomware's impacts on society, specifically regarding economic health and geopolitical security, known as third-order harms.

Last week, we discussed the many impacts your business suffering from ransomware has on “second-order harm,” downstream businesses, and average, ordinary people. This time, we wanted to return to “first-order harms”… those the impacted business has to deal with itself.

It can be too easy to look at ransomware as a business problem. After all, it attacks businesses, locking down their data for ransom, often selling it or spreading it, and sometimes altering it for the business if returning it at all. It can be too easy to overlook another impacted target in all the mess.

What happens to the people whose data a business has collected and uses?

When considering your company’s cybersecurity, it is important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees… or, in other words, not to forget the basics around which the rest of your protections are built.

We’re hoping that you are actually reading this post to prepare yourself if your business were to face a ransomware attack, but if you are suffering from one right now, we encourage you to reach out to us immediately, whether you are a client or not. Ransomware spreads quickly, and once it has infected a system, there really isn’t much you can do to stop it. However, there are steps you need to take to come back from this gracefully.

With ransomware becoming one of the single most dangerous threats out there for small businesses, it’s more important than ever to know how to protect your company from its influence. Thankfully, there are measures you can take, including some very powerful ones like zero-trust policies that can thwart attempted ransomware attacks.

You don’t need us to tell you that ransomware is a problem (or maybe you do–we mean, it’s a huge problem). It’s dangerous to both businesses and individuals, and it has become such a common threat that all organizations need to have a plan in place to address it with their staff. Today, we want to highlight a three-part strategy that you can use to approach ransomware in the most secure way possible.

There are a lot of threats to businesses nowadays, but ransomware seems to be the worst… or at least, the most feared. It seems as though we can’t mention cyberthreats anymore without mentioning ransomware. Unfortunately, we’re right to do so, and the reason for this is a simple one.

We throw around the term “ransomware” an awful lot, and while we’re confident that most people have some level of familiarity with the concept at this point, it is important that we acknowledge that not everyone has our experience in dealing with it. As such, we wanted to answer some of the questions we hear fairly often about ransomware.

Of all the cybersecurity threats out there for your business to contend with, there are going to be a few of them that are just more likely to impact you than others. That’s just a statistical reality. Fortunately, these threats can be addressed, so let’s discuss how you can do so.

It sincerely seems that every other day features news of another cyberattack, and it isn’t uncommon for the word “ransomware" to be tossed around an awful lot. Let’s take a few moments to go over—or review—what ransomware is, and arguably more importantly, how to handle any you or your team encounters.

The headlines hyping up ransomware as a dangerous threat are not exaggerating. It really is as bad as it seems, although there is often a fair amount of embellished information on what ransomware exactly is and what it does. Let’s take some time to review what ransomware is and how your business can handle it in an appropriate way.

Ransomware does not discriminate by industry, audience, business size, or otherwise. It will always be a threat to your organization, no matter what you do or who you serve. Let’s take a look at some of the commonly targeted industries that ransomware is used against.

Imagine your business becomes the target of a ransomware attack. The situation is dire, and you need access to your data. You decide to pay the ransom, even though all security professionals advocate for the opposite. The worst is behind you, you think. This is unfortunately not the case; there are countless other costs that ransomware can bring to the table, and none of them are good. Let’s examine the true cost of ransomware beyond just the ransom.

We apologize for the pun, but we couldn’t help ourselves.

When you go about your business and attempt to onboard a new client or implement a new tool for your company, you spend time getting to know what your business is doing and why. Well, a newly formed ransomware group will spend up to two weeks mapping your network before launching its attacks, making it a potent threat actor that you should keep an eye out for on your business network.

Ransomware is an incredibly potent threat that has ravaged the cybersecurity landscape for several years now. Many users who get struck by ransomware feel like they have no choice but to pay the ransom, but others have banded together to create a community of resilience in the face of such a threat. Thanks to the efforts of one particular agency, victims of malware can enjoy access to malware removal tools for free.

This past May, Ireland’s Health Service Executive—the organization responsible for providing healthcare and social services to the country’s residents—was successfully targeted by a major ransomware attack. Unfortunately, we are still talking about it now because the entire situation has forced us to acknowledge the aftereffects of such an event.

Countless high-profile ransomware attacks have surfaced over the past several years, all against targets like manufacturers, pipelines, hospitals, and utility companies. Obviously, these attacks are a cause for concern, but some small businesses might make the mistake of thinking themselves too small to target. Unfortunately, this is simply not the case; we’ll help you protect your business from these devastating cyberattacks.

Ransomware has been a scourge to businesses for years now, with it unfortunately experiencing a renaissance of sorts as the COVID-19 pandemic came to the fore. With increased phishing attacks and other means of spreading ransomware now taking advantage of the ongoing situation, it is all the more important that these attempts can be identified and mitigated.