Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security by your existing cybersecurity tools. Ransomware attacks have significantly more consequences than the cost of remediation, assessment and regulatory reporting. Perhaps the most significant of all is the loss of business through reputational damage that can take years to repair.
Information technologies services giant Cognizant provides a sobering example of what can happen. The company who is one of the largest IT Managed Service Providers in the world, saw their revenues decline from $509 million to $360 million in less than one quarter after the attack, even while industry revenues were still soaring.
It certainly doesn’t help that this company was in the industry of advising other companies about how to protect themselves. More recently, a subsidiary of DXC Technology, a large global MSP provider, announced that they also suffered a ransomware attack that took services offline for several hours.
Ransomware is increasingly targeting MSPs and IT service providers who often find themselves caught off guard while using traditional cybersecurity solutions that focus on the fortress approach, building moats, walls and sentries around their assets.
The Fortress Approach
This approach is becoming less effective every day. Corporate assets are no longer stationary, but constantly moving targets, in airports, in cafes, in homes, wherever people choose to work, especially in the days of COVID 19.
BlackFog takes a different approach. It assumes cybercriminals are already in (typically infected at remote locations and laterally spread through the corporate network, or even insider threats). Organizations are so busy fortifying the building, they do not consider that the threats are already in place, exfiltrating data outside the network.
Advanced persistent threats (APT’s), often remain latent for months before activating and are very difficult to detect with existing technology. BlackFog focuses on both Privacy and Data Security. By watching traffic leave the device it can determine (based on behavioral patterns) when something unusual is happening and can prevent it in real time.
As is often the case in life, it is not always about what is happening right in front of you that’s important, but what’s happening behind you.
