1 month ago
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Studies show that 80 per cent of victims of ransomware will receive another attack, according to a specialist in the field of cybersecurity based in Trinidad and Tobago.
But David Green, Managing Director of CYPFER, a global cybersecurity and ransomware recovery management company, says seven out of 10 companies do not have a cyber incident response plan in place to deal with such issues which have become commonplace.
The cost to victims of cyber incidents is expected to reach $265 billion over the next six years, he said.
“Based on the statistics, things are so bad now, from a sophistication point of view, that you can basically expect 80 per cent of the organizations that suffer a ransomware attack, and pay the ransom, they’re going to get hit again,” said Green, a Jamaican with 30 years’ experience in information technology-related services, during at the annual anti-fraud seminar staged last week by the Jamaica Bankers Association and the Jamaica Institute of Financial Institutions.
Ransomware is a type of computer attack that holds a victim’s sensitive data hostage, threatening to keep it locked until a ransom is paid to the attacker.
Green traced the first worldwide ransomware attack back to 2017, but said the problem really took off during the COVID pandemic in 2020 and is only getting worse, with some executives calling it the number one plague on earth.
Green said the type of extortion in which a company’s files were encrypted and a ransom demanded for their release was no longer popular. Instead, he said data was only being stolen, but the thieves threatened to release it publicly if a ransom was not paid.
The IT specialist said Jamaica was being specially targeted in the Caribbean because of the good performance of the financial sector.
“In Jamaica you are getting hammered (by cyberattacks). And the reason is … you guys are doing really, really well. There is a saying, ‘You don’t throw stone at an empty mango tree’,” he said.
Green urged companies to determine how to minimise the damage to their data, protect the most important data in their company, and determine how to get the company up and running in the shortest time.
“The goal of incident response is always going to be ‘how do I keep my damage to a minimum, how do I get my recovery time to manageable space, and then how do I prevent something from happening in the future’,” he said.
“The most important thing that you have in your organisation is your data. After that, you need to understand what your crown jewels are,” Green said. The crown jewels, he added, could be a core banking or financial application, human resources, research and development or legal precedents, depending on the company.
Emphasising the importance of data security to a company’s success, Green says how a company responds to a cyberattack can actually benefit that company in the future.
“When we do mergers and acquisitions one of the very early questions that we ask the company that we’re either going to buy or we’re going to merge with is ‘what’s your cybersecurity posture looking like? We want to know what we’re about to get ourselves into because if we connect you to us, are you going to be the weak link in our network?’ I have seen deals literally fall apart simply because the company’s (cybersecurity network) just wasn’t up to scratch,” he said.
English (US) ·