The epidemic of ransomware in 2016 and the Wannacry and Golden Eye/Petya attacks in 2017

have made ransomware a top-of-mind concern for all organizations. Both those attacks used components to spread globally in hours, affecting hundreds of companies and bringing down critical infrastructures.

According to Bitdefender Labs, over 400,000 new malware/ransomware

variants are created daily, and 99% are only seen once before they are modified. Traditional signature-based AV simply cannot keep up because, by the time a signature is created, the malware has already changed.

Security Managers across all industries should worry

but those in Health and Financial should be the most concerned, as their industries are the most hunted by ransomware producers. A partial accounting of the damage from an attack includes: reduced productivity and efficiency; increased system downtime; loss of proprietary data; loss of personal identifiable information; lost time restoring data after a breach or infection; damage to a company’s reputation (which can result in lost opportunity costs); and compliance fines.

To date, there are roughly 2.8 million known unique samples of ransomware

and the numbers keep growing. Ransomware attacks are becoming more sophisticated with file-based, fileless, and multi-stage/component variants employed by cybercriminals. These attacks once again highlight the importance of deploying the right kind of multi-layered defensive framework to protect crucial data and the IT infrastructure.