2017 definitely has seen its fair share of cyber security news stories, this current day and age we live in is filled with a plethora of cyber security threats, from uncountable sources. It is partly because of these malicious threats that saw the need for an update in the ways company store and process data, hence the introduction next year of GDPR (to learn more about GDPR contact us to recieve our GDPR Whitepaper)
Just to give you a starting point statistic, according to a report from pandalabs, in Q3 of 2016 18,000,000 new malware samples were captured in that quarter alone, averaging out at approximately 200,000 a day. The scary part is this is the statistic only for the malware that was captured by one single company; the totality of malicious malware that bypasses the system is unknown, and continuously growing on a daily basis, which is why it’s harder and harder for companies to combat it.
Have you heard about the concept of ransomware? Ransomware is now the number one security concern for organisations across the world. It is a sophisticated malicious attack which unlawfully gains access to devices and files, it blocks access to them by encrypting them and displays message on the user’s screen to pay X amount to regain access to those encrypted files. It spawned in Russia between 2005 and 2006, and during its early years of conception mainly targeted smaller files like images and word documents,
To give you an example of a wide scale ransomware attack, it happened very recently. A cyber-attack known as ‘WannaCry’ caused an incredible amount of havoc across the NHS in May, which not only led to patients not being seen, but also caused for urgent operations to be cancelled. Within just 3 days ‘WannaCry’ had targeted around 200,000 organisations across the world. The hackers found a flaw in Microsoft software, and used this to spread across networks encrypting all the files.
Another enormous area for concern when it comes to company cyber security is phishing and whaling. We will discuss these areas in next weeks blog episode!