Lately we have had the opportunity to see inside some ransomware attacks and what the cost has been to businesses. For example, I wrote about the Petya malware and what it did to the shipping giant Maersk and the law firm giant DLA Piper. Now we get to find out what happened inside a different […]
Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]After the WannaCry Ransomware affected businesses in 150 countries last month, you would think that people would have learned. Apparently not. The Petya ransomware doesn’t encrypt files, it encrypts the whole disk. Unlike typical ransomware that picks selected files (like Word or Excel files), instead this ransomware replaces the Master Boot Record or MBR and […]
Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]For a long time I have said that there are multiple forms of ransomware such as: The hacker encrypts your computer and gives you the decryption key if you pay the ransom. The hacker encrypts your computer and DOES NOT give you the decryption key when you pay the ransom. The hacker PRETENDS to encrypt […]
Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]UPDATE (5/16) – Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is still reeling from the effects of WannaCry. Some say that 95% of the NHS computers are still running Windows XP, which Microsoft stopped supporting over 3 years ago and for which there was no patch to block this malware. Many people attribute the fact that these […]
Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]Sorry, but I am not going to be very sympathetic to this law firm. Here is the story. A Rhode Island law firm, Moses Afonso Ryan, was hit with a ransomware attack. Apparently, the company did not have a plan for dealing with a ransomware attack. In general, if you have good backups and have […]
Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]According to NBC, the FBI projected ransomware payments to hit a billion dollars in 2016 (Note that stats seem to be hard to find, so I don’t know if the FBI thinks that number was reached). In 2015, they said the number was $24 million. That is a bit of a growth curve – 41x […]
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