Ransomware may be an old technique, however, due to increasing levels of digital connectivity, are witnessing a proliferation of ransomware attacks in recent years, which pose significant threats to individuals, businesses, and entire industry sectors industries.
Ransomware, in its current form, has evolved into a lucrative criminal enterprise, exploiting vulnerabilities in cybersecurity defences worldwide.
This alarming trend has garnered widespread attention prompting urgent calls for enhanced security measures, robust defences, and international cooperation to combat it.
According to the World Economic Forum, ransomware activity was up 50% year-on-year during the first half of 2023 with off-the-shelf Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) kits, (such as LockBit) where prices start from as little as $40, a key driver in the frequency of attacks.
And it’s big business. Reports suggest annual revenues from ransomware attacks are already in the tens of billions, while some predict ransomware damage costs will exceed $265 billion by 2031.
And in 2024, cyber-criminal gangs are carrying out even more attacks and are doing so at a faster rate. This has resulted in the average number of days taken to execute a ransomware attack falling from around 60 days in 2019 to just four today.
Clearly, ransomware remains a significant threat to business resilience for several reasons. Its impacts range from operational disruption to severe financial losses and even long-term reputational damage.
Understanding why ransomware is pivotal in any discussion regarding long-term business resilience is crucial for developing effective cybersecurity strategies.
Widespread Impact
Ransomware can affect every aspect of a business. When critical systems are locked down or data is made inaccessible, operations can grind to a halt. This can lead to lost revenue and missed opportunities and can disrupt services or goods delivery, affecting customers and business partners alike.
Financial Costs
The immediate financial impact of a ransomware attack includes the ransom payment (should a company choose to pay), which can be substantial. Beyond the ransom itself, businesses also face costs related to system restoration, increased cybersecurity measures, potential legal fees, and fines for regulatory non-compliance. There are also indirect costs such as lost productivity and the urgent need to divert resources from other projects or operational areas.
Data Breach and Privacy Concerns
Most ransomware attacks often involve data theft before encrypting the victim’s data. This dual-threat approach means businesses risk losing access to their data, while simultaneously potentially facing a data breach. This can lead to legal and compliance implications, especially under strict data protection regulations like GDPR in the European Union, CCPA in California or PDPL in KSA and UAE.
Reputational Damage
Public perception of an organisation can be severely tarnished by a ransomware attack, especially if customer data is compromised or service disruptions affect stakeholders. Restoring a reputation after such an incident takes time and resources. Some businesses never fully recover.
The 2021 cyber-attack on Colonial Pipeline springs to mind, which led to legal changes and served as a wake-up call for many in the industry regarding the importance of cybersecurity measures and the potential consequences of such breaches.
Further examples like the Maersk NotPetya and UK NHS WannaCry incidents (both taking place in 2017) still being popular examples show the impact on an organisation’s reputation over time.
Increasing Sophistication of Attacks
Ransomware groups continually evolve their tactics, techniques, and procedures. This includes leveraging more sophisticated ransomware software, using advanced tactics to avoid detection, and targeting backups to prevent recovery. The increasing sophistication makes it harder for the average in-house IT team to defend against attacks and recover from them, without external expertise.
Targeting of Critical Infrastructure
Ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure sectors — including the likes of healthcare, energy and public services — underscore the significant risk they pose to broader society, not just targeted organisations. These attacks can have cascading effects that impact public safety and national security.
Insurance and Recoverability Issues
As ransomware attacks have increased, so have the complexities associated with insuring against them. Some insurers are scaling back their coverage of ransomware or increasing premiums. This shift makes it crucial for businesses to enhance their resilience, to ensure they can withstand and recover from an attack, without relying too heavily on insurance.
Building Resilience
To counter the threat of ransomware, businesses need to implement robust cybersecurity going far beyond compliance checklist practices such as regular backups, phishing awareness training, and multi-factor authentication.
A comprehensive incident response plan, including scenarios for dealing with ransomware, is crucial, as is regular testing of disaster recovery and business continuity plans to ensure they are effective against ransomware attacks (and other forms of cyber-attacks).
By understanding the impact of ransomware and taking proactive steps to mitigate these risks, businesses can enhance their resilience and protect themselves against the potentially devastating effects of such attacks.
Risk management and MDR
But to further enhance business resilience, what is really required, is early detection and response, halting cyber criminals before they get a foot in the door.
Obrela is fully aware that expansion of your digital presence is inevitable – but gaps in your security don’t have to be.
Obrela delivers risk-aware operational security that provides visibility across every point in your ever-expanding digital universe.
Our SWORDFISH® platform consolidates all security data and turns data into actionable intelligence, meaning threats can’t hide just because your business grows.
As the World Economic Forum explains: “The lion’s share of IT security budgets is currently spent on prevention, with around 35% directed to detection and response. However, if undetected, an intrusion can quickly escalate, and once data is encrypted and/or stolen, the costs snowball – as much as 1,000 times higher than if an incident is not detected and contained early; the difference between a €20,000 loss turning into a €20m one.”
As we witness the growth of cloud computing and IoT services, the traditional security perimeter is dissolving. And the human element adds further unpredictability to the equation.
OBRELA’s simple mission is to bring predictability to the seemingly uncertain, allowing you to orchestrate and control every element of your business’ cyber defence through a single, holistic platform.
With a centralised view that spans your business and its risks, Obrela helps you prioritise the most important issues in real-time, so you make focused decisions and begin to work with reassuring predictability in the face of uncertainty.
Our expert advisory team can deliver a comprehensive risk assessment service as part of our suite of cybersecurity solutions. This multi-step service is designed to help organisations identify, analyse and mitigate potential risks to their information systems, applications, and networks. We can also advise on gaps in your SOC provision and compliance.
Our risk assessment, management and threat monitoring and detection are overseen by the Obrela Labs team, the offensive arm of the business, which acts as a catalyst for innovation, sponsoring and leading open-source security projects and actively contributing to the global security community. Our dedication extends to providing real-world solutions for evolving threats, ensuring your organisation stays one step ahead of potential adversaries.
Obrela’s bleeding-edge solutions allow you to focus on your biggest business risks, rather than looking at global cyber threats. Through better understanding, the risks, emerging threats and their potential effect on your business resilience can be assessed, monitored, predicted and dealt with.
With a focus on understanding, the attacker’s perspective, Obrela equips organisations with invaluable insights to truly fortify their defences.
Ultimately, real business resilience needs to come from an organisations’ culture. Obrela’s advisory services can help inculcate organisation-wide cultural shifts, from greater staff awareness and use of MFA to red teaming and pen testing.
Time for a comprehensive risk-aligned security programme
Obrela is working towards the concept of integrated cyber risk management, comprising visibility, readiness and resilience.
A comprehensive risk-aligned security programme needs true Visibility: comprehensive real-time monitoring across the complete digital universe, attack surface management and data fusion.
Meanwhile, Readiness involves undertaking a readiness assessment to establish the baseline.
Obrela will work closely with you to measure and continuously improve readiness, gradually moving away from Incident and Threat Management to Context-Aware Risk Management.
A pragmatic, systematic and proactive approach to Resilience means emphasising the importance of preparedness and response capabilities – and awareness that no system is completely immune to cyber threats.
To measure resilience, we recommend integrating quality assurance principles into cyber defence operations.
How to best protect cloud operations
Obrela offers protection for cloud-based operations, via its hybrid (cloud and on-premises) Managed Detection and Response (MDR) solution.
MDR services are crucial for organisations seeking comprehensive cybersecurity solutions that extend beyond traditional security measures, providing real-time threat monitoring, detection, and response capabilities.
Obrela’s hybrid MDR solution integrates both cloud-based and on-premise components to provide a versatile, comprehensive security management framework. This solution is particularly beneficial for organisations with complex IT environments that span public clouds, private clouds and on-premise infrastructure.
Hybrid MDR solutions provide continuous monitoring of all IT assets, regardless of their location. This includes real-time data analysis from both cloud environments and physical on-premise networks.
Advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms are utilised to detect known and emerging threats. This includes anomaly detection techniques that can spot unusual patterns that may indicate a cybersecurity threat.
By integrating both cloud and on-premise data, the solution offers a holistic view of the current security posture, enabling more accurate and timely detection of threats.
A hybrid model allows organisations to scale their security operations as needed without being confined to physical infrastructure limitations.
Organisations opting for a hybrid MDR solution benefit from a comprehensive, integrated approach that covers their entire digital landscape and allows for greater assurance of business resilience. This enhances an organisation’s ability to detect and respond to threats quickly while maintaining holistic control over its data security across multiple platforms and locations.
