Ransomware attacks are way down for consumers. Malwarebytes has tracked a drop-off of 72% compared to this time last year. Hooray!

However, that’s not what we are concerned with here at Vitanium and we doubt you are either. We are concerned about the 4381% increase in attacks on organisations. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s true. Going from just over 30,000 attacks to over 1.4million attacks in just a year! Organisations are now being targeted as much as consumers, with the trend set to continue.

Hackers are becoming more and more sophisticated and meticulously plan their attacks on businesses. It may take a little longer to gain access to a system, but the monetary reward far outweighs what they can achieve from the average consumer. Just take a look at how much governments are paying in ransoms!

What can we do to combat this?

To start with, it is important to train staff to be more cautious, especially with their emails and internet use. However, anyone can slip up. An email might be particularly convincing, perhaps with a spoofed email address to look like a trusted sender. In the event of a disaster you need a good backup solution to ensure any important data is still available. Viitanium’s solutions for this are Datahive and Veeam.

On top of this, an advanced EDR (Endpoint Detection & Response) is a great addition to help defend a system. Vitanium’s recommendation is Panda. The key difference between Panda and other anti-virus solutions is that it doesn’t just check files and programs against a known list of viruses. This leaves out all of the new viruses that are being produced every day! Instead, Panda have a huge list of known executable files that are known to be safe and only lets those run. Click here for more information on Panda!