Cybersecurity company Lumu is helping businesses understand the scope and scale of the ransomware threat with The 2020 Ransomware Flashcard.
Ransomware remains one of the most pervasive and insidious security threats to enterprise organizations. In 2020 alone, dozens of recognized brands have been forced to disclose that their networks were breached and their data encrypted by a motley crew of global criminal organizations.
Beyond the disruption to their operations and the financial hit to their bottom line, these attacks have also caused considerable reputational harm to the brands themselves – which has increasingly become part of the calculus of criminal organizations intent on inflicting the maximum amount of damage possible.
Ransomware attacks are hardly a new phenomenon. In fact, the first documented case dates back more than three decades when a scientist named Joseph Popp distributed 20,000 floppy disks infected with the AIDS Trojan to attendees of the 1989 World Health Organization annual conference.
Over the past decade, ransomware has become the preferred malware vehicle for hackers and criminal organizations alike. Not only are there tens of thousands of variants that security teams need to defend against, but the threat actors themselves are no longer following the same playbook. Indeed, they’ve shown themselves to be more organized, systematic and intentional in how they select their targets and deploy their payloads.
To help businesses and their users better understand the scope and scale of the ransomware threat, Lumu, a cybersecurity company focused on helping companies measure compromise in real-time, has published The 2020 Ransomware Flashcard. This infographic-styled report compiles recent industry research data to show the frequency of ransomware attacks, the average cost of an attack, the geographic distribution of ransomware attacks and shows which industries are being targeted.
Ransomware operators are of course also feeling emboldened by the massive number of people now working remotely due to the pandemic, exploiting known security vulnerabilities in remote-desktop protocols and preying on the poor security practices of a workforce that is unfamiliar with proper remote security protocols.
Learn more about the ransomware threat and how to keep your users and network protected by visiting Lumu’s Ransomware Resource Center.
