We like “March Madness” much better than “March Malware” but that whole Madness thing is trademarked. Truth be told, in March, or any other month, we’re usually talking about malware way more than basketball, unfortunately. And March seems to have brought with it more malware than usual, or maybe we’re seeing that “usual” is about to get a lot more frequent, aggravating and dangerous.
We hope your tourney bracket is doing better than the California hospital hit by ransomware last month. Ransomware, as you may know, is exactly what it sounds like, software that encrypts data or otherwise denies system access – and then demands a payment to release systems and/or data back to the control of the owner.
How a hospital could lack the backups necessary to restore their systems without paying the $1M+ ransom it’s reported they paid, we don’t know. Last year, one of our clients let a variant of Cryptowall ransomware onto their network -- and while it was a pain to clean up, no ransom was paid, and less than an hour’s data was lost, owing to the frequent backups made and the ability to recover them quickly. So that level of protection is certainly well within reach of small and medium-sized businesses. Clients on our Vigilance BDR service have that today.
In March Malware, we’ve seen dozens of phishing attempts, a whole range of virus alerts, and at least four ransomware infections reach client desktops. That’s four more than last month. Fortunately, up to date antivirus software caught all the ransomware – and alerted us to the fact that it did.
Of course, that alerted us again to the need for greater system security, about the need to have layers of security and about the need to have those layers actively monitored and managed. We have excellent tools and processes in this area, but we’re upping our game and will have more to say about that in the coming weeks. If you don’t want to wait, contact us today to discuss your system security – we’ll take away your worries and leave you with “nothing but net”.
