Download: Four ransomware myths you need to stop believing
In the old days, ransomware attacks were just that: an attacker would commandeer your system, and refuse to give access back until you paid a ransom.
Now, like all successful businesses, ransomware has grown. Ransomware attackers look to extract as much value from your business as possible. This is not just limited to the ransom itself – another element they can make money from is your customer data and intellectual property.
This information will probably be stolen either way – whether you restore a backup, or even pay the ransom. Once a ransomware attacker lets you know they are in your system, they have probably made off with any valuable information.
This means that you may be liable for a privacy breach, which in turn means you need to tell your customers – and take the hit to your reputation this comes with. If intellectual property is stolen, you may suddenly find yourself dealing with surprisingly hard-to-beat new competitors in the near future, as businesses are spun up using the IP you spent years developing.
The other problem with backups is that ransomware attackers don’t typically make themselves known the minute they gain access to your system. Rather, they gain access, then slowly make their way through to the most sensitive parts of your business. While they do that, they figure out how much of a ransom you can afford, and how to inflict the most pain possible on your business.
This means that by the time they shut everything down and demand a ransom, they've already been in the system for a long time. When you roll back to a cloud backup, they’ll be in the backup as well.
The existence of cloud backups is no secret to ransomware attackers. They know that restoring from backups is one of the first things you’ll try to do.
So they combat this by attacking your backup system as well as your main system. You may go to restore from a backup, only to find that it has also been encrypted – and all you can do is either pay the attacker, or start your system from scratch.
Let’s put everything we just mentioned to one side, and assume that you can just recover backups and get back to business. How straightforward do you think this will be?
Even if your backups are immaculate, it’s going to take time to get things up and running. This means down time. And that down time means lost opportunities, and major slowdowns in production. This means less revenue and a significantly depleted bottom line.
Cloud backups are just one ransomware myth that business owners need to stop believing. We identified three more myths about ransomware from our years of providing Cyber Security services to all sorts of businesses. Download our guide to read all four myths – and to learn what you can do to protect yourself.
