Ransomware Attacks Are Increasing

Ransomware attacks are one of the risks that companies have to deal with while adapting their business models to the digital era. These attacks are intended to get hold of critical corporate data and can endanger your company in many aspects. You should assuredly take some precautions against ransomware attacks so that this or other cybersecurity threats will not bring large-scale and negative consequences to your company.

What Do Ransomware Attacks Aim At?

Regarded as one of the major threats faced by corporations, not only in cyber terms but also in the general sense in the 21st century, ransomware attacks can result in poor outcomes, up to the loss of your whole business network. Due to ransomware attacks, critical workflows with great importance to the sustainability of your business model are highjacked or become inoperative. So, it is extremely possible that you will experience large-scale financial losses as a consequence of the precluded continuity of your business.

The challenges you have to struggle with are not just related to the financial dimension of the business. You may have to deal with conditions such as violations of many laws and obligations, mainly regulations related to data protection laws, because ransomware attacks make the digital structure on which you base your business model, inoperative. In another words, personal and corporate data stored within the fabric of your corporation can be hijacked, and you may encounter challenging litigation processes as a result of the lawsuits that may be filed.

Besides, there is also a new threat method employed by cyber attackers using ransomware: if they access your company data through a cyberattack, they may threaten you with disclosing sensitive information to the public. If this happens, it can seriously harm your corporate reputation.

The 2021 First Quarter Report and the Increase in Attacks

According to the report published by Coveware on ransomware attacks, the average amount paid for ransom attacks in the first quarter of 2021 has increased dramatically in comparison to the last quarter of 2020. In addition, in the first quarter of 2021, the attack rate has increased by 10% against the last quarter of 2020.

While the average amount of money paid for ransomware attacks in the last quarter of 2020 was $154,108, in the first quarter of 2021, the average amount that companies subject to the attack were obliged to pay reached $220,298, a 43% increase level. According to the report based on data recorded since 2018, the amount in the first quarter of 2021 has been the second-highest amount of the three years.

Given results of this research, you may require professional support to protect your corporation from this threat.

In one of the cases in recent weeks, cyber attackers infiltrating the infrastructure of the Colonial Pipeline, one of the largest oil pipelines in the USA, caused the fuel transfer to be paused, resulting in a supply crisis affecting the whole country. In this incident, which caused the price per gallon to reach the highest level of recent years after thousands of people flocked to the gas stations to stock up on fuel, the cyber attackers threatened to reveal the data of the company. They reached their goal when Colonial Pipeline paid a ransom of 4.4 million dollars.

Ransomware in A Nutshell

To better understand the issue, we’ll briefly describe the path followed by these attacks before outlining the security systems you can use to protect your company against ransomware attacks. Primarily, ransomware encrypts all files on the infected system, makes them unreadable, and changes their extensions. Ransomware utilizes advanced encryption algorithms to encrypt all files owned by your corporation.

The fact that your data is taken over by software using a secret encryption while running in the background without being noticed, puts you on an irreversible path. Likewise, it can take a long time to reverse the processing and encryption power of ransomware and recover your corporate data. Due to all these reasons, it is recommended that you make use of security systems that offer a comprehensive security solution.

Privileged Access Management (PAM)

Privileged Access Management (PAM) is one of the most relevant security solutions. PAM monitors and identifies users accessing your company's data, protecting you against ransomware, and ensures that transactions proceed uneventfully in all business sectors, regardless of the size of the company or volume of business.

Single Connect, Kron’s PAM solution, offers five critical security modules, so that privileged access can be successfully controlled. Single Connect aims to ensure that your company's brand identity is not endangered, and makes it possible for you to have complete control by scrutinizing every aspect of data security through the modules it incorporates.

• Privileged Session Manager: Privileged Session Manager, one of these five Single Connect modules, forestalls potential confusion in access management.
• Password Vault: The module that features an encoded infrastructure, blocks the theft of privileged passwords thanks to its password vault function.
• Multi-factor Authentication (MFA): MFA requires and validates place and time approval for privileged access requests.
• Dynamic Data Masking: Records and masks all the transactions performed by system administrators, and eliminates any doubts regarding the transaction history.
• Privileged Task Automation (PTA): PTA automates routine work, eliminates service outages, and boosts productivity.

Kron offers high-tech software solutions in telecom and cyber security that ensure your data and access security Our PAM solution, Single Connect, is included in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Privileged Access Management 2020 report.

Single Connect authorizes secure access to IT resources in order to prevent data leaks and cyberattacks employing compromised privileged accounts, and records all access activities within the IT layers. Single Connect’s modular structure helps you to comply with GDPR and other regulations, and it can also be purchased on a module-basis by IT teams and companies with their own servers.

Contact us for detailed information about Single Connect, and start benefiting from the advantages of an advanced PAM solution witinh a very short time.