5 Years That Altered the Ransomware Landscape
WannaCry continues to be a reminder of the challenges that organizations face dealing with the ransomware threat.
Ransomware encrypts or steals data to disrupt operations and extort victims, making backups, access controls, and incident response essential.
Search across headline titles and summaries.
Background for this topic.
Ransomware is malware used to deny access to systems or data, usually by encrypting files and demanding payment for decryption. Many operations also steal sensitive information and threaten to publish it, so an attack can create both an availability crisis and a privacy or disclosure risk. Initial access may involve phishing, stolen credentials, exposed remote services, or exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities; attackers may then move through the network before deploying the payload.
Defenses should combine vulnerability management, phishing-resistant authentication where practical, endpoint and network monitoring, and backups that are isolated from routine administrator access and regularly tested for recovery. Organizations should also limit privileges and segment critical systems to reduce the blast radius. An incident requires rapid containment, preservation of forensic evidence, restoration from known-good backups, and assessment of notification, legal, and regulatory obligations. Threat intelligence can help identify relevant criminal infrastructure or tactics, but it does not replace sound access control, patching, detection, and recovery practices.
WannaCry continues to be a reminder of the challenges that organizations face dealing with the ransomware threat.
New federal cybersecurity rules will set timelines for critical infrastructure sector organizations — those in chemical, manufacturing, healthcare, defense contracting, energy, financial, nuclear, or transportation — to report ransomware payments and cyberattacks to CISA. All parties have to comply for it to work and help protect assets.
NYC-area cybersecurity expert shares the anatomy of a Quantum Ransomware attack and how to prevent, detect and recover from a ransomware attack, in a new article from eMazzanti Technologies.
Conti's ransomware attack cripples Costa Rica's Treasury, sparking the US to offer a $15M bounty on the group.