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SECURITY
Building your data castle
By David Trossell , CEO & CTO , Bridgeworks
www . 4bridgeworks . com
How to protect the company from ransomware and how to restore data following a breach
The data centre is the castle . You can pull up the drawbridge , fill up the moat , or pull down the portcullis . But at some point you have to let data in and out , and this opens up the opportunity for ransomware attacks . No longer is it a matter of pride and peer recognition in the hacker community for circumnavigating and exposing the security of an organisation , it ’ s now a fully-fledged industry in its own right with the use of ransomware . Cybersecurity company Herjavec Group estimates that the cost of ransomware topped $ 1 Billion in 2016 . In the past , those under siege used to flood the moats , pull up the drawbridges and drop the portcullis to protect themselves , but for the modern data centres their life blood is the movement of data in and out of the data centre .
The question now is not just how can organisations protect themselves from ransomware , but also what are the best practices and policies for recovery in case they get through ? Data has to flow in and out and that opens up the route for security breaches , and the most profitable one is ransomware .
So can it be prevented from ever occurring , and how can that be achieved ?
After all , as always , prevention is better than cure and the first line of defence has to involve firewalls , email virus scanners and other such devices . The problem is that the writers of the code of computer viruses are always one step ahead of the data security companies that offer solutions to protect their customers . This is because the industry tends to be reactive to new threats rather than proactive .
With so many devices connecting to the corporate network , including bring your own devices ( BYOD ), there will always be an attack that gets through , especially as many end users are not totally savvy with how viruses and other such scams can be attached to emails while masquerading as normal everyday files . A certain amount of end user education will help , but there will be the one that gets through . So to protect ourselves , organisations have to have back up plans on policies to deal with the situation when it does happen because we can ’ t keep the drawbridge up forever .
Is ransomware new ? So how long have ransomware attacks been around ? Well , excluding the viruses written by governments for subversion , we have always had viruses that hackers write for fun , notoriety , or to use as a robot in a denial of service attack . They may also use an email relay . With the coming of Bitcoin , where payments can be received anonymously and as you see from the Herjavec Group ’ s estimates , it can be lucrative while also being costly to the organisations that are attacked . This is why companies should be creating their very own data castles , and they should only drop their drawbridges
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