The #1 Reason Ransomware Works

Ransomware can be a nightmare, but it doesn’t have to be.

Last May, some 200,000 PC owners worldwide suffered a costly wake-up call from the aptly named WannaCry cryptoworm that encrypted their data. The attackers demanded $300 in bitcoin payments to unlock the data. Hospitals, universities, automakers and logistics firms were among those reported hit, but the worst affected were small and medium-size businesses.

Why those businesses? Because their data wasn’t sufficiently protected with complete backups like larger enterprises. And that’s the whole reason ransomware works: Victims can’t afford to lose their data, so they pay up, even if payment is no guarantee they’ll get their data back.

With WannaCry, hundreds paid the ransom but got nothing in return. And if Dell EMC’s 2016 Global Data Protection Index is any indication, ransomware can still find lots of targets: 90 percent of the survey’s respondents are behind the curve in the maturity of their data protection strategies.

Dell EMC aims to help them change that with practical, cost-effective and greatly simplified data protection (DP) that works 24×7 across all kinds of data workloads, no matter where they reside — on-premise, in the cloud or some hybrid of the two.

Growing Needs for Comprehensive Data Protection

Organizations of all sizes need DP. While malware and anti-virus safeguards are necessary to safeguard data from threat actors, they are not sufficient to guard against phishing attacks, which are how ransomware and advanced persistent threats can circumvent defense-in-depth strategies. Also, organizations need DP’s backup and recovery capabilities to provide business continuity in the case of system failures or disasters.

Read the entire article here, The #1 Reason Ransomware Works

via the fine folks at Dell