Massive Payday for Ransomware
IT World Canada is reporting that a major Canadian company was forced to pay $425,000 in Bitcoin over the weekend to restore its computer systems…
The report goes on to state that they were left with no alternative due to their backups being compromised by the same ransomware.
Yet another example that backup and business continuity cannot be an afterthought. Keeping your backups attached to your network have been proven to be ineffective against these attacks. Modern backup and business continuity needs to be an automated, validated and off-site solution that isn’t dependent on your hardware.
Back in the good ol’ days when we were just worried about failed hardware or staff deleting things accidentally, backups were simple. Today, we need to assume a hostile actor on the other side of the computer. These organized criminals are looking to wipe out your business and charge you for your data. As this weeks attack shows, there is big money in being a bad guy.
A few other interesting notes from this article:
“It started with spear phishing targeting six senior company officials who were sent a PDF attachment with a malicious payload…”
“It is believed the attackers then spent several months hunting around the network to find data stores before releasing the ransomware, which spread across the corporate network including backed up data…”