Unfortunately, executives including small business owners, CEO's, CIO's, CFO's, and the like- are a major part of the problem, representing a significant weak link in security. Not only are they a prime target for hackers, but according to Mimecast's 2018 email survey, 40% of respondents agreed that their organization's leadership was a major "weak link" in their organization's cyber-security operations.
Also of note, 31% of respondents said that leadership are very likely to have accidentally sent sensitive or proprietary information to the wrong person, a statistic up 9 percent from last year.
The reality is that, email is the primary means by which ransomware winds up getting inside company networks. This comes with a staggering 92 percent of successful ransomware attacks arriving via that channel, resulting in three or more days of downtime for the impacted companies.
Phishing attacks also continue to be a major issue, with 90 percent of respondents reporting an increase in the number of phishing attacks they were subjected to.
In light of these statistics, one would imagine that companies would be devoting significant resources to countering the threat. Unfortunately, that's just not the case. There is some money being spent on infrastructure, but humans are the weakest link in this chain, and not just the leadership of an organization. According to the survey, only 11 percent of organizations continuously train their employees on how to spot cyberattacks, and just over half (52 percent) perform training just once a year.
Matthew Gardiner, a cyber-resilience expert at Mimecast, summarizes it this way:
"Security awareness is an important part of any high-functioning security program. But like all security controls, there is no silver bullet solution. The best security programs seek a balance between technical controls, boosting their human firewalls, and having IT enabled business processes that are resilient to failures, whether man-made or caused by technology."
For those that would like more information about how to protect themselves from Ransomware, please contact a representative at EDM Automation at 747-500-5054.
There are two main components we will discuss…
- A full image backup of important computers and servers with versioning so that you can go back an hour, a day or a week.
- Business-class security software that can act in real-time, catch even the most sophisticated malicious software before it causes damage and roll the damage back to a previously good state.
Hope this helps.
EDM Automation
4445 Corporation Drive Suite 291
Virginia Beach, VA 23461
Lee Nelson