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80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again

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Re: 80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again

#101
post #56

“Never negotiate with terrorists” is a simple and clear mantra, and as most clear and simple concepts it hides a lot of assumptions. One of them is you are ready to lose the hostage in the worst case scenario. That’s how the police sees it, because the society benefits more from being firm in individual cases than losing a few of its members that might not come back anyway. That’s a hard one to swallow, hard enough t…

I mean couldn't government pay the ransom and then go great lengths to track the suspects and send special forces after them? Surely US govt. has the ability to track almost anyone. Having US govt. on your ass should a decent deterrent. Just take a look at how hard FBI came down on cartels and individuals who were involved in killing Enrique Camarena. Cartel leaders were arrested in Mexico and several individual in t…

It appears that some of the major ransomware gangs are operating from Russia and are tolerated by the government, as long as they don't hit domestic targets.

The US cannot really send special forces there without risking a massive escalation.

Re: 80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again

#103

Looks like ransomware criminals are going for the subscription model.

Once the criminals start maintaining their own backups of victims data and helping them restore from rival attacks, they can successfully call themselves a mob. Somehow, that's a quite believable scenario.

If only organizations would backup their own data. Then they could just restore and avoid paying.

I have a backup device of my own at home and that's the one I have to use. The company I work relies on some MSFT service that is pretty inflexible and won't back up the entire machine.

Re: 80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again

#104
post #5

Shouldn't they improve their security?

Given 0-day vulnerabilities and supply chain risks, I'm going to take a little bit of poetic license and say it's impossible to stop ransomware attacks, certainly with commercially viable levels of investment in infosec. You can mitigate some of the exposure, but the level of validation required to continuously guarantee that those mitigations are intact and effective.

So attacks will continue, the level of impact will hopefully be reduced along with the commensurate justifiable ransom payment.

Re: 80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again

#106
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean couldn't government pay the ransom and then go great lengths to track the suspects and send special forces after them? Surely US govt. has the ability to track almost anyone. Having US govt. on your ass should a decent deterrent. Just take a look at how hard FBI came down on cartels and individuals who were involved in killing Enrique Camarena. Cartel leaders were arrested in Mexico and several individual in t…

It appears that some of the major ransomware gangs are operating from Russia and are tolerated by the government, as long as they don't hit domestic targets. The US cannot really send special forces there without risking a massive escalation.

I'm sure the US has hundreds of spies and personnel in Russia at any point in time.

But sending a spy to a software developers house and assassinating them probably isn't going to stop the problem - more people will spring up doing the same.

Re: 80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again

#107
"After an organization experienced a ransomware attack, the top 5 solutions implemented included security awareness training (48%), security operations (SOC) (48%), endpoint protection (44%), data backup and recovery (43%), and email scanning (41%)."

Only 43% of organizations invested in data backup and recovery after a randsomware attack? I would expect that number to be closer to 100%!

Re: 80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably trying to diversify pronoun usage. Would we be pointing this out if they said 'he'?

No, because for better or worse “he” is the default for a plurality or unknown gender in most (all?) romance languages, including English. Times and sensitivities change but “she” still connotes more knowledge than “he” so it’s bound to cause some confusion.

what was true centuries ago is no longer true. "he" is not gender neutral in English, in any sense of the term. it's only used as such in historical writing - languages evolve over time. "she" connotes as much knowledge as "he".

Re: 80% of orgs that paid the ransom were hit again

#109

Looks like ransomware criminals are going for the subscription model.

They're becoming a file encryption service. No one can steal your files either because they will just get encrypted trash.

Though I suppose those thieves could also pay for the encryption key, or just go directly to the "service provider" for a paid copy.

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