Ransomware has emerged as one of the most dangerous modern threats to businesses, and when you consider just what’s at stake with a ransomware infection, you’ll realize we’re not exaggerating. The worst variants of ransomware will attempt to extort you through any means necessary, and when you don’t give in so easily, they’ll pull out the big guns: double and triple extortion.
They say a man’s home is his castle. We’d contend that a more apt comparison is that someone’s business is more like their castle, realistically speaking. As such, it is essential to ensure your security in every way possible. Much like a traditional castle was constructed to keep threats out, your business’ security needs to be approached in a similar way. While we aren’t suggesting that you literally dig a moat or maintain cauldrons full of boiling oil, you do need to implement security measures that serve the same purpose for your business and its network.
We wanted to take a minute to talk a little bit about something we all cherish: hope. Hope is a powerful force and it constantly propels us forward and can brighten even the darkest days. We hope for good health, happy families, and definitely that winning lottery ticket. Unfortunately, hope is a terrible cybersecurity strategy.
With so many devices now connecting to the Internet, decreasing your business’ threat surface area is more important than ever. Your threat surface area consists of any device that connects to your organization’s IT infrastructure, and if you’re not careful or forget a couple of oddball wearables, you could be looking at a data breach. Today, we want to go over how you can prevent that from happening.
Fairly recently, news circulated that a data breach had exposed 16 billion—yes, with a “b”—passwords for various logins, including social media accounts, virtual private networks, corporate tools, and more. Effectively, every online service imaginable was represented in this breach. This is very bad… arguably unprecedented. However, this impression is at best misleading. Let’s dig into the truth of the matter, while still acknowledging that there are some lessons to be learned.