It’s every CEO’s worst nightmare. You arrive at the office early one morning to find every computer is frozen, your business data is locked on every computer screen.
There’s a warning demanding a huge amount of money to restore your data, while a timer counts down the minutes until every shred of information is going to be wiped off your systems unless a ransom is paid.
Meanwhile, your employees can’t work. Your customers can’t buy products. You’re bleeding revenue by the minute and you’re sweating bullets in front of all your executives and staff.
Could it happen to you?
Unfortunately, yes. The odds are bad and they’re getting worse.
So far this year, more than 700 U.S. companies have been hit by ransomware, earning cyber criminals mega-millions in huge payback and continued control over their victims, and those are just the attacks we know about. Others are never reported.
So why has ransomware become so relentless? It’s because it’s all about the money. It’s a very successful business model for all the wrong people. And ransomware has become a major source of very easy money for cyber criminals who know where and how to exploit vulnerable networks.
Most people think ransomware just locks and encrypts data. It’s one single act. It’s one single moment, but it’s far, far more pervasive.
There are actually three phases of ransomware attacks.
The first phase is all about the attacker getting into your system without your knowledge and embedding themselves to have full access for a long period of time before you ever knew they were there. They get all the back doors in all the operational pieces in place.
They plant all the malware for triggering. They steal all of the data ahead of time and they exfiltrate it. And the last thing an attacker will do, the last thing, is to activate that encryption process, to lock your data. This is a loss leader for these criminals. They are not making any money in the first phase. They have to spend a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of risk before getting to the final moment when they expose their presence to their victim. And only then do they start encrypting your data, because once they do, everybody knows you’re there. Everybody knows the criminal is active. And now they’re in reaction mode. This is why phase one is not where money is made for ransomware.
Phase two and three are where criminals make all their money and start ransoming your data back to you.
Let’s talk about phase two. Your stolen data has already been copied by the criminals, it’s been stored elsewhere and exfiltrated, and now the attackers will now threaten to expose and sell your stolen data if their ransom demands are not met; and even if you pay a ransom to unlock your data that you have during phase two, they still have their copy and they’ll continue to ransom that copy back to you multiple times and even more dollars, because it’s one thing to have your data operational again on site. It’s another thing to have this threat where the data can be stolen.
And that is phase three.
This is where they’re making even more money. It’s where there were not just ransoming your data back to you, but they’re also immediately selling it to third parties at an even bigger profit than during phase two. Phase two and phase three are where all the money is made.
So how do we end this ransomware crisis?
It’s really simple. Since criminals are making big money off your data, it’s time for you to turn the tables on them and have a solution that removes the problem. Today, data can think for itself and protect itself automatically, no matter where it goes in the world, no matter who has it, no matter where it’s stored, and no matter how many copies remained or exist.
Our technology, the first of its kind anywhere, lets you infuse your data with self-protection tools and intelligence, and it’s embedded with your data at the data level; so you can continue to control your data, however, and wherever you want, no matter where it goes, no matter where it’s stored in perpetuity.
The fact that phase one attackers can still infiltrate networks and plant their malware without anyone detecting means that there’s an enormous amount of technology on the market today that is not able to work as expected to protect us.
The entire cyber market is based on one premise, data cannot protect itself, and that is the one premise that ransomware actors are counting on. Ours is the platform that allows data to be self-protecting, self-aware and intelligent.
We don’t try to treat the symptoms of data loss. We made data smart. Now the bad actors can’t access or steal or ransom your data if it’s infused with our award-winning technology. I invite you to learn more about self-protecting, intelligent and self-aware data security technology. Better yet, take a test drive for yourself during one of our upcoming demos.
Keyavi Data intelligent self-protecting data is what you need for the ultimate peace of mind.
