The New Technological Challenge for Companies in the COVID Era

The Global COVID-19 Pandemic has led to an increase in ransomware attacks in various industries around the world. Ransomware, which is a class of malware that poses a risk to your business and your devices, camouflages itself inside another file or program that is palatable to the user, inviting them to click on email attachments, videos from pages of dubious origin, or even updates to systems and programs that are supposed to be trustworthy, such as Windows or Adobe Flash.

Cybersecurity for Companies

Mandatory confinement has changed the way many companies work, which represents a new challenge for their cybersecurity strategy. To facilitate telecommuting, they have had to create remote access points for their employees, something that many hackers are taking advantage of to launch attacks to gain access to internal company data, either for industrial espionage or to obtain sensitive customer information.

Such attacks can be a major blow to any business, especially in terms of finances and credibility. A data breach can cause a company to lose the trust of its customers. It can also lead to financial losses as most cyber-attacks are launched to cripple the company’s activities and demand a ransom. So now more than ever, businesses need to strengthen their cybersecurity.

A global survey of 2,200 IT leaders and senior security professionals led by CrowdStrike Intelligence Services reveals that the United States is among the top five countries most affected by all types of ransomware in 2020; in Mexico, 67% of ransomware victims paid the ransom to restore access to their data last year, according to a Kaspersky survey of 15,000 consumers worldwide. Despite this, paying the ransom does not guarantee the return of stolen data for everyone. However, as public awareness of potential cyber threats grows, there is the reason for optimism in the fight against ransomware.

Criminal groups are increasingly shifting to COVID-19 themed phishing lures that exploit their consumers’ and employees’ concerns about the pandemic and the safety of their loved ones. Some of the most important challenges for enterprises against ransomware in 2022 are:

1. Performance. For years, IT teams have focused on accelerating backup speeds and times, accepting that extended recovery times are an inevitable reality. But, in today’s “Always On” world, extended recovery time after a ransomware attack is simply unacceptable and “traditional” backup media is an insufficient solution for today’s needs. To increase backup speed, some companies perform synthetic backups or mirror storage, however, the recovery process requires assembling data from multiple generations, residing in different locations, resulting in a pseudo-random read pattern. That is, random I/Os are sent to the drives, which negatively affects the retrieval time.
2. Costs. Many customers, frustrated with the slow recovery speeds of their backup systems, have opted to move to All-Flash solutions to solve the random I/O problem, but this dramatically increases support costs. And because some (sometimes most) data is duplicated at the source, it is no longer possible to significantly reduce its size at the destination, making flash media capacity even more expensive.
3. Resiliency. The need to recover data quickly and effectively after a ransomware attack has become a key issue. Slow recovery time as a result of hardware failure or replacement is simply unacceptable. IT infrastructure must reach at least five nines (99.999%) availability as the minimum required for all critical components, and this without skyrocketing costs.
4. Elasticity. In a world where organizations compete by accelerating the speed at which they deliver new services, business agility means competitive advantage. To have a reliable recovery plan, and in particular to preserve effective business continuity, it is necessary that capacity consumption is done in an intelligent way. With today’s storage systems, it is complicated and costly to adopt an automated deployment model across all tiers, and they don’t allow you to leverage CapEx and OpEx models as needed.

For companies, in the current situation, it is not too late to invest in cybersecurity.

7 tips to prevent Ransomware!

• Never click on a risky link. Avoid links you find in spam emails or on websites you don’t know. If you click on a malicious link, you could initiate an automatic download which, in turn, could lead to an infection.
• Don’t give out personal information. If a stranger asks you for personal information by phone, email, or text message, ignore it. Sometimes, when hackers have their next victim in mind, they’re looking for personal information to tailor the deceptive messages they’ll use in their attack. If you doubt the veracity of a message, contact the sender directly.
• Never open a suspicious attachment. Emails with attachments are one of the ways that ransomware can gain access to your device. If you doubt a file, don’t open it. To make sure a message is trustworthy, check who sent it to you and verify that the address is correct. Never open an attachment if you need to enable macros to view it. If the attachment is infected and you open it, it will run a malicious macro that will give control of your computer to a malicious program.
• Never use an unfamiliar USB stick. Avoid plugging in USB sticks or other storage devices if you don’t know where they came from. Cybercriminals may leave infected drives in public places in the hope that someone will have them and use them.
• Keep your device’s applications and operating system up to date. By regularly updating the operating system and applications you have installed, your device will be better protected against malware. When you download an update package, make sure the latest security patches are included. Patches reduce the risk of a hacker exploiting vulnerabilities in your applications.
• Don’t download files from unknown sources. To minimize the risk of introducing ransomware to your device, never download applications or media files from sites you don’t know. If you’re going to download something, download it from a trusted and verified site. Verified sites are distinguished by having a “trust seal”. When you go to a website, check the address bar of your browser and make sure the address begins with “https” instead of “http. Seeing a padlock or shield in this bar can also be an indication that the site is secure. And don’t forget to keep your guard up when downloading something to your mobile device. This varies by device, but Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store are two sources you can trust.
• Use a VPN service when connecting to public Wi-Fi. To protect against ransomware, use public Wi-Fi with caution. When you connect to a public network, your device is more vulnerable than usual. To avoid risk, whenever you use a public network, refrain from confidential transactions or use a VPN service.