Cyber Crime, Ransomware, Malware, Phishing, Whaling – All Have One Thing in Common… Business Disruption

2017 THE WORST YEAR FOR RANSOMWARE SCAMS WITH SOME EXPERTS PUTTING IT AT $4BN GLOBAL IMPACT

Cyber risk modelling firm Cyence estimates the potential costs from the hack at $4 billion, while other groups predict losses would be in the hundreds of millions. The attack is likely to make 2017 the worst year for ransomware scams, in which hackers seize control of a company’s or organisation’s computers and threaten to destroy data unless payment is made.

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What is the impact?

BUSINESS DISRUPTION!!

The obvious answer is business disruption because, whilst elements of the actual ransomware payments may be quite low, the ability to react and maintain businesses can be a different story.

What happens is that organisations have to be reactive which can lead to challenges in:

• Productivity
  • Day to day business activities can sometimes need to be put on hold while resources focus on fixing or restoring the data and systems needed to maintain the business
• Immediate Access to Data & Systems
  • First line customer facing data and systems may be prohibited and as such the customer experience may be impacted. Work that was not backed up will be lost or inaccessible
• Backups and Restore Processing
  • To enable a DR approach, the physical process of either failover or restoring data from backups may be required which can take time. This will also highlight issues or gaps in both the backup and DR planning scenarios if these haven’t been significantly tested
• Refresh, Upgrades and other IT Infrastructure
  • As a root cause analysis is developed, there could be unknown issues that surface such as end of support or lack of supported IT systems. The resolution to this could be upgrades of both hardware, firmware and/or software which can be an unbudgeted set of requirements

What is SCC’s Solution?

Clearly, every incident will have different business and timeframe drivers, but effectively a more proactive solution can benefit organisations who are aware of the risks and issues and have a plan in dealing with these.  Some risks will fall in to the “unknown unknowns” camp, but intelligence and updates on these can help proactively understand, plan and mitigate.

Through the partnership between SCC and Mimecast, a number of the issues explained above can be averted through a proactive plan:

Threat Assessment Management: Advanced security technology that enables protection from spear-phishing and whaling attacks to include real-time, on-click, website scanning protects against good websites turning bad, or delayed exploits

Email Security Management: Take advantage of our free Email Security Risk Assessment service that will highlight gaps in both on premise and cloud hosted email infrastructure to enable gaps to be addressed

Restore / Always On Management: Clearly getting the DR policy and process right is one thing, but to have the ability to have access to email is critical as often numerous attachments and business critical data resides in there. This solution provides the capability and comfort of a 24/7 availability which can cover any cloud service outages as well.

How Can SCC Help?

Contact SCC to take advantage of the free Email Security Risk Assessment service to help you understand, plan and mitigate any issues within your organisation.

SCC have been helping organisations understand how to be proactive as well as reactive to the cybercrime wave that is seemingly prevalent in 2017.

Contact SCC today