A friend of mine from Rajkot told me that two of his friends, standalone photographers were attacked by WannaCry and they were asked a ransom of $300 within 24 hours post which this will increase to $500 failing which all the data will be lost.
A well-resourced, determined individual can get into any IT eco-system he wants; forcing us take a side in the decade-long debate ‘Is cyber security a myth?’
Cyber attacking has become a game of fun today. Today’s evolved cyber attackers won’t just ask for money, fame or an island – all they want is to prove their superiority by bullying websites of government or enterprise.
Today, it is very difficult to constantly protect ransomeware against technical, human and threat intelligence. Thus making cyber defence the most critical aspect for Fortune 500 companies to SMEs.
On 15 May 2017, a virus called WannaCry wreaked global havoc and even after 3 days of it infecting over 200,000 Windows OS in 150 countries, cybersecurity experts are still finding how it invaded networks in such a large scale.
It is high time for businesses to learn from cases like #WannaCry – Since cyber criminals are becoming extremely intelligent in getting new ways to infiltrate, businesses have to be at least two steps ahead. If not today, then businesses will have to adapt an internal policy to avoid such attacks anytime in future. The simplest of strategy can be to keep everything updated; from operating systems to web browsers to firewall, antivirus software to regulating passwords at indefinite intervals. All this is to make sure there is not even a nanocrack for these ransom malware to enter.
Not only businesses are the targets – Cyber security firm Quick Heal Technologies said 60 per cent of the attempts by the malicious WannaCry ransomware were targeted at enterprises, while 40 per cent were on individual customers adding a total of 48,000 infected devices. Sanjay Katkar, MD, Quick Heal Technologies said, “Our observation is that the attack is not focused towards any particular industry but it is widely spread across industries especially those organisations which are online and connected”.
There has been so many breaches in last few years. In February, Bangladesh Bank was attacked where cybercriminals were successful in stealing US$81m. In December last year, Yahoo revealed that a data breach from August 2013 had affected a billion users. In all these instances and more, the impact was catastrophic if not severe. Cybersecurity has become one of the toughest tasks for CIOs, security experts, security decision makers & evaluators.
From data breaches to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), businesses are at a higher risk than ever before. The big question at the #BigCIOShow – Are companies as agile as their attackers are?
Trishneet Arora, CEO, TAC Security, aims to deliver a keynote at the Sixth Edition Big CIO Show to be held in JW Marriot in Mumbai on 14-15 June 2017. Trishneet, a school dropout at the age of 23 secures some of the biggest players in India like RIL, Amul and CBI. His cyber security startup, TAC Security provides complete vulnerability assessment solutions, which involves the process of identifying, quantifying, and prioritising the vulnerabilities in network infrastructures. His business model includes a friendly hacker that helps corporate giants recognise its weaknesses before the fraudulent hackers can use them adversely.
Catch him live at the #BigCIOShow discussing some of the latest cybersecurity insights and trends.
