It was just over a year ago that Colonial Pipeline was brought down with a devastating ransomware attack. Within 24 hours of discovering the ransom note, CEO Joseph Blount made the decision to pay $4.4 million to the perpetrators. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Blount said that the although the decision was […]
Ransomware is a hot topic in IT circles today that solicits hypothetical questions such as, should you pay the ransom? It’s a question that creates interesting fodder, and one that’s answered a lot easier in theory versus reality. If your entire network is locked up in an encrypted state, the get-out-of-jail transaction of paying the […]
A reliable backup process is the backbone of any disaster recovery plan. But what type of backup is superior when it comes to ransomware recovery? Are the old tried-and-true physical backups the superior option, or is backing up to the cloud the way to go? Physical Backups: Limited Access, but a Hot Target Physical backups, […]
How realistic would it be for ransomware to successfully exploit weaknesses in the obscure firmware systems running inside PCs? There’s certainly a lot of things to aim at, ranging from the UEFI BIOS that boots PCs to the many other barely-documented firmware running on chips most owners pay absolutely no attention to. An unfortunate characteristic […]
Back in April, the North Carolina State Legislature became the first state to approve a law banning ransomware payments by government agencies. The law, which was part of the Current Operations Appropriations Act of 2021, S.L. 2021-180 (PDF), includes the following language: (a) No State agency or local government entity shall submit payment or otherwise […]
In less than a decade, ransomware has turned from something tech people discussed at cybersecurity conferences to a phenomenon that fills news websites with tales of damage and desperation on a daily basis. But despite this, ransomware still sometimes feels like a background war where one side takes heavy casualties but reacts with little more […]
