Atlanta Still Dealing with Effects of Ransomware Attack
The City of Atlanta is still struggling to bounce back a week after falling victim to a ransomware attack. According to reports, Atlanta residents are unable to pay water bills or parking tickets, and employees have to fill out all paperwork by hand. The city says there is no evidence to believe any customer or employee data is compromised, but they are recommending residents contact credit agencies and monitor their accounts as a precautionary measure.
Court proceedings for people who are not in police custody are canceled until computer systems are functioning properly again The hackers set a deadline of April 4 for the ransom payment, but the city has not indicated if they will give in to the demand of roughly $50,000 to possibly regain access to their data. In an unrelated attack, Boeing has also fallen victim to a ransomware attack, although it appears to be on a much smaller scale. The airline manufacturer was hit with WannaCry, the massive attack that made headlines last year. According to Boeing, they have deployed a software patch to mitigate the attack and it was limited to a small number of machines.
How to Avoid CyberAttacks? Employee Education: CYBERSECURITY 101 It's critical that your staff understands what ransomware is and the threats that it poses. Provide your team with specific learning experience examples of suspicious emails with clear instructions on what to do if they encounter a potential ransomware lure (i.e. don’t open attachments, if you see something, say something, etc.) see CYBERSECURITY 101 training program. Security: Antivirus software is essential for any business to protect against ransomware and other risks. Ensure your security software is up to date to protect against newly identified threats. Keep all business applications patched and updated to minimize vulnerabilities. Backup Disaster Recovery: Modern total data protection solutions take snapshot-based, incremental backups as frequently as every five minutes to create a series of recovery points. If your business suffers a ransomware attack, this technology allows you to roll-back your data to a point-in-time before the corruption occurred. First, you don’t need to pay the ransom to get your data back. Second, since you are restoring to a point-in-time before the ransomware infected your systems, you can be certain everything is clean and the malware can’t be triggered again. EmailSecurity: Use a real Cloud-based email security platform, a robust, secure, and legally compliant email filter and encryption. Assessments: Quarterly Network Security Review, Did you know that most security vulnerabilities occur inside a business, behind the firewall? In fact, more than 70% of all cyber security incidents today are the result of INTERNAL security issues that no firewall, anti-virus or malware device could have prevented, schedule yours now. Finally, remember to NEVER pay the ransom demand. As we found in SynerTech’s State of the Channel Ransomware Report, there’s no guarantee you will retrieve your data even if you pay the ransom and you are supporting the hackers' efforts.
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