22 Texas Towns Hit With Ransomware Attacks

In the month of August 2019, NPR verified that officials discovered 22 municipalities had been hit with ransomware. One of the officials stated that the attackers had asked for $2.5 million to unlock the files.

If there was any question of the need for protection against attacks in general, particularly ransomware, this should be a pretty solid indicator that the need is imperative.

What\’s the price of unprotected IT infrastructure? Cybercrime Magazine says that global damages will surpass $6 billion as soon as 2021.

SecureChannels.com – Oct 24, 2019

Municipalities are not the only folks vulnerable to attack. One customer of Covenant Computing found us through an attack they had experienced, destroying more than 19 thousand files. We were able to recover 16K of those lost files by deep scanning their network-attached storage device on which this customer stored their working files. This took about a week to accomplish. This was several years ago, and recovery plans have improved at this site utilizing an encrypted cloud backup to a local NAS that has snapshot backups implemented. It\’s pretty safe to say they will not be losing their data.

Cloud storage solutions like OneDrive and Google Drive are vulnerable to attack as well as being used as attack vectors. Check out this Forbes article explaining a recent attack using Google Drive to bypass company security measures.

So, what do you do? You understand that there will be disaster at some point. We buy insurance on a regular basis to mitigate these inevitabilities, so why not do the same thing and budget an insurance plan for the life-blood of your company: your data. The best thing you can do to mitigate a disaster in IT is to take one step. Employ an IT organization or staff that knows how to defend against these attacks, then let them loose to do what they know best.

Security is not a one-step solution. There are different avenues of attack, and every company needs someone on their side that understands these attack points so they can defend against them and establish a contingency plan when an attack does get through.

Covenant Computing can defend you with expert staff and partnerships that leverage teams that are specialized in their field to provide top-notch support for your organization.

Give us a call today: 4698447789

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