The economic damage of a successful major cyber-attack against a large cloud services provider could be similar in scale to the financial impact of a destructive hurricane. The destructive tropical cyclone hurricane Katrina hit the US in 2005, causing $108bn in damage — but that could be exceeded by theRead More →
Ransomware payments in 2017 will hit a record $2 billion, according to a new research from the cybersecurity firm Bitdefender. That figure would make 2017 the most costly year ever for ransomware, doubling the $1 billion paid out by ransomware victims in 2016 and skyrocketing above the $24 million paidRead More →
Cyber-warfare – Yesterday a massive DDoS attack took down a large portion of the Internet leaving sites offline or at dial-up speed. At first it was thought that the issue was neutralized, however as midday approached another massive attack rendered major sites unavailable. The attack was targeted at a majorRead More →
Ransomware is one of the fastest growing areas of cyber crime. The intended target is often small and medium sized businesses, because they have fewer resources compared with larger organizations. Historically, the root word ransom refers to a criminal demanding a payment in exchange for releasing someone or something thatRead More →
As was summarized in this publication’s introduction to the first article in this two-part series on the ransomware crisis, published on April 18, ransomware has blossomed into a crisis-level phenomenon recently in U.S. healthcare. The first nationally reported mainstream media news story in this drama was that around Hollywood PresbyterianRead More →
The growing concern with ransomware attacks at hospitals is provisionally a healthcare IT problem, but as the number of such attacks grows, it will quickly become a financial one as well. Just a single ransom sum has been disclosed: Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles paid the equivalent ofRead More →
Ransomware has seriously turned on to a noxious game of Hackers to get paid effortlessly. Once again the heat was felt by the Los Angeles-based Presbyterian Medical Center when a group of hackers had sealed all its sensitive files and demanded $17,000 USD to regain the access to those compromisedRead More →