Ransomware Has Evolved and it keeps evolving! Cybercriminals continue to pose threats to enterprises. Just to name a few recent victims: The city of Atlanta, Boeing, and the UK National Health Services were captivated by cyber attackers.
While hackers have been around for years their ways to enter our IT infrastructure have evolved. Earlier it used to be through phishing attacks – sending emails to untrained employees that entice them to click on a dangerous link. Now companies have trained their employees, computer users, in general, have become savvier to phishing attacks, spam and email filters have become more efficient, and/or the amount of ransomware news has made us all aware of the threat. Whatever the reason(s) cybercriminals have upscaled their game.
Today an important entry point for hackers and ransomware is through unpatched software that's where software patching comes.
Let’s analyze two recent cybercrimes and examine the means of entry. In the breach at Equifax, it is estimated that 147 million US and 15 million UK names, birth dates, and social security numbers were exposed. The criminals were able to enter Equifax through an unpatched server. that hosted Equifax’s dispute resolution software.
More recently one of the largest soft drink suppliers in the U.S., Arizona Beverages was infected. Lots of Windows-based computers and servers were wiped clean, effectively destroying their sales operations for 7 days until the incident response team from Cisco was called in. Although its UNIX/Linux systems were unaffected, the ransomware left the company without any computers able to process customer orders for almost a week. Ransomware’s entry point into Arizona Beverages was also an unpatched server operating system. Many of Arizona’s back-end servers were running old and outdated Windows operating systems and a lot of them didn’t receive security patches in years.
Earlier, having a firewall and virus scanner at the borderline of your network was enough. However, the cyber security threat now requires additional types of security measures.
Automated Patch Management –Patching of operating systems and Read More