It now appears that the latest ransomware attack was really a cyberattack to paralyze Ukraine. It wasn’t a profitable ransomware attack because that was never the goal.
Yes, it was meant to paralyze Ukraine, but it was also meant to send a message to the United States. War is war. The United States and EU have their sanctions as weapons; Russia has wicked malware that can neutralize the economic advantage of the West. Maybe it’s time to stop compiling a list of evil doers and try some negotiating for a change. And I’m hardly an apologist for Putin, who is a bonafide thug, but the US has been throwing its economic and military might around since the end of the Cold War and until a few years ago, Russia could merely sit and watch. A few military misadventures and a financial crisis later, I guess times have indeed changed.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I’m not in IT, but I read the IT horror stories threads on another forum, and … One would think so, but one would be surprised how few big companies do. It’s just not in the budget to do two offline backups per [%time that won’t completely screw us if we were to lose it], and keep one offline and one offsite, as is the best practice. Add that to the average user storing the last ten years’ worth of email in their “deleted items” folded instead of the backed-up network share…
As they say, make an idiot-proof design and they’ll make a better idiot.
Fortunately, cloud-based consumer backup services (Carbonite, etc.) keep several revisions of each file. Not as good as a comprehensive IT-managed plan, but enough to avoid ransomware problems as long as the user is moderately attentive.
It’s important to have a good backup and recovery plan, but that’s a bit like having good insurance and then leaving all your doors and windows (haha) open.
There are ways to stop people from plugging in a memory stick with that nifty game they downloaded free. IT departments should be updating all the computers in the organisation as soon as they are available. After that it is down to education and discipline.