Company culture, training, resources. Sure, that costs money - but there isn't a direct correlation between spend this to prevent that.
Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It
71–80 of 101 posts
Re: Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK the idea is to have backups so good, that restoring them is just a minor inconvenience. Then you can just discard encrypted/infected data and move on with your business. Of course that's harder to achieve in practice.
Modern ransomware are not just encrypting data but uploading them somewhere too, the victim is then threatened with a leak of the data. A backup does not save you from that.
[dead]
Re: Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It
#73Companies spend a ton of money on very sophisticated, powerful, invasive, and expensive software to protect themselves against ransomware.
But the best antidote to many forms of ransomware isn't security software at all— it's offline backups.
Like so much in cybersecurity, an analysis by spending categories like this feels like vendors and their marketing teams driving the discourse. Even if we accept that dollars provide the right lens through which to look at this problem, companies that spend more on making sure they have good backups and good restore procedures aren't going to show up as spending more on cybersecurity in this kind of analysis.
Re: Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's one of those ideas that sounds nice in theory, but doesn't survive contact with the real world. In the same way that many people would say that you shouldn't negotiate with terrorists or kidnappers; but if it's their loved one who's being held and tortured they'll very quickly change their mind. Getting to a world where no one pays ransoms and the ransomware groups give up and go away would be the ideal, and we'…
If you make it expensive enough to pay ransoms outright, throwing money at security starts looking more appealing. A ban on paying ransoms isn't the right tool for this. Fine them, punitively, with a portion set aside to incentivize whistleblowing.
[dead]
Re: Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It
#75Re: Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's one of those ideas that sounds nice in theory, but doesn't survive contact with the real world. In the same way that many people would say that you shouldn't negotiate with terrorists or kidnappers; but if it's their loved one who's being held and tortured they'll very quickly change their mind. Getting to a world where no one pays ransoms and the ransomware groups give up and go away would be the ideal, and we'…
If you make it expensive enough to pay ransoms outright, throwing money at security starts looking more appealing. A ban on paying ransoms isn't the right tool for this. Fine them, punitively, with a portion set aside to incentivize whistleblowing.
Financial costs won't solve the problem for companies, because they're hard to enforce. You'd be weighting up the cost of dealing with the fallout of getting hacked against the cost of paying the random and the chance that you might get caught and fined. If that former cost is existential for the business, then it'd always be worth paying and taking the risk.
The only real way around that would personal consequences for the owners/directors of the company - "get caught paying a ransom and the whole board goes to jail" would certainly discourage people. And also provide a wonderful opportunity for blackmail when people did.
Not to mention all the problems of fining public sector organisations, and how counter-productive that usually is.
Re: Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It
#77The idea that the spending needs to grow linearly with the growth is a damning indictment of the mindset of the vast ineffectual mess that is the cybersecurity industry.
It’s not a popularly held mindset, either within the security industry or outside of it. This piece seems to be pitched at salespeople whose only job is to extract money from other companies. Basic hygiene security hygiene pretty much removes ransomware as a threat.
It's not often presented as "we should be spending more", but it's absolutely true that cybersecurity is predominated by a reflexive "more is better" bias. "Defense in depth" is at least as often invoked as an excuse to pile on more shit as it is with any real relation to the notion of boundaries analogous to those in the context from which the metaphor is drawn.
The security industry absolutely has a serious "more is better" syndrome.
Re: Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It
#78Stopping Ransomware is trivial if governments knew where the money goes. But cryptocurrencies and lax capital control pushed by the uber-rich makes it impossible. The technology is there and it is used to track the average citizens every move. But when it comes to rich people then the money goes and comes without control (and without taxation). Cryptocurrencies are a great solution to enable criminal activity. Their…
Crypto is such a net negative for society. What cracks me up is how much crypto is emblematic of Libertarianism. Sounds promising if you think about it a superficially, but is obviously bad if you actually think about it in any real world terms. And not just abstractly - they both fall apart for the exact same reasons. Libertarianism is essentially "But, what if we scaled up the failures of crypto to all of society?"
[dead]
Re: Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It
#79Re: Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It
#80Companies spend a ton of money on very sophisticated, powerful, invasive, and expensive software to protect themselves against ransomware. But the best antidote to many forms of ransomware isn't security software at all— it's offline backups. Like so much in cybersecurity, an analysis by spending categories like this feels like vendors and their marketing teams driving the discourse. Even if we accept that dollars pr…
The company losing access to the data is only one half of the ransomware thread. The other half is unauthorized parties gaining access to the data. Backups only protect against the former.