A headline in the Tallahassee Democrat last month read, “Ransomware Reportedly Hitting NBC 40 in Tallahassee,” while another before that read “Imagine the Credit Union is taking all appropriate steps following a possible cyberattack”.
In June, I laughed when I read Ed Perrine, former COO of Network Tallahassee, about when your organization was hit by ransomware. He said in the Democrat that “I was really tempted to just go home and drink.” Well said, Ed.
As I told the Legal Administrators Association of Tallahassee in a speech last month, all cybercrime is sneaky; but ransomware is as dire as it gets and could actually warrant a powerful drink.
Cyber crime:Imagine the credit union taking all appropriate steps after a potential cyber attack
Disturbance:The infamous Russian cyber gang could be behind disrupting local CW, FOX and NBC subsidiaries
Shopping:Supply chain crisis impacts Tallahassee businesses, testing shoppers during the busy holiday season
This is how ransomware works. One day you received an email in your office that appeared to be from a shipping company. Hackers like to imitate shipping companies because our world has become an order, everything my home world. For example, my wife is obsessed with her Amazon shipments. It’s like mini-Christmas every week, usually from Ulta, so not very Christmas for me.
Either way, you will receive your shipping confirmation email or an email that says “Your shipment was delayed” so you can click immediately and WHAMO! Your computer is infected, all files are encrypted and cannot be accessed.
Then the code spreads to the next computer in the office and the next until the entire organization is brought to its digital knees while you slump in your chair hoping IT has great backups to restore everything before you did have clicked.
Until then, your screen will usually have a clock that will count down the time you have to pay the ransom to get your files back. Hackers will ask for large sums of Bitcoin and if you pay them they may give you the encryption keys they promised to get your files back, after all, they are criminals.
As long as people keep paying this ransom when infected, more and more people will jump into the hacking game. To be clear, these aren’t even hackers half the time. These are just criminals who went to the dark web and bought a ransomware toolkit and are now sending thousands of emails with malicious code and if either of us clicks they might have a payday.
We all need to be prepared to stop this crime by having 100 percent situational awareness using email, text messages, phone calls, and web browsing. Hackers are literally on every corner, you need to treat computers like driving a car, look both ways, use your signals, look in the mirror, double-check everything before moving on.
As you can see from the examples above, hackers aren’t just after the big boys and girls like Colonial Pipeline or Solar Winds. I am sure you have seen these bodies on the national news, they haunt you and me too.
We won’t start winning the cyber war until we stop falling for these attacks and, more importantly, until we stop paying. If you are infected, the best strategy is to wipe all of your devices and restore your network from backups.
The bottom line is that we have to throw everything we have into this fight. Implement two-factor authentication, robust passwords, redundant backups, run training and phishing simulations, install anti-virus and anti-spam tools, buy cyber insurance (I got mine from Earl Bacon here in Tally) , install an enterprise firewall and deploy advanced threat monitoring, isolation and management tools
Most importantly, before you click any emails, you verify yourself, don’t reveal your passwords to anyone for any reason, and stay safe out there. Also, as Thanksgiving Month, we courtesy of our online readers we’ve put together a free cyber training here for more info, and yes – it’s safe to click youtube.com/watch?v=70wq28QbiJA.
Blake Dowling is CEO of Aegis Business Technologies, author of the book Professionally Distanced, moderator of the Biz & Tech Podcast, and writes for multiple organizations. He can be reached at dowlingb@aegisbiztech.com
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