

While restoring from backups is ideal when compared to paying cybercriminals, companies with rapidly changing data or an ineffective backup schedule will often find this solution costs more than paying the ransom.
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Attempt to restore the data from backups – IT departments that conduct regular data backups that are stored offline in the event of emergency can restore otherwise encrypted information without having to pay a ransom.

While there are many steps that can be taken to determine the best course of action after an attack, organizations ultimately choose between three options: Once an organization understands the value of its data, it can understand the best resolution to a ransomware attack. Information security calculations such as Single-Loss Expectancy (SLE) can be used to determine the damage done to a company’s profits.

This estimate of loss does not encompass other factors such as productivity lost and resources wasted due to day-to-day operations being disrupted. With black market estimates of patient records estimated at $50 per record, a hospital that sees over 10,000 patients yearly faces a loss of over half a million dollars of information if encrypted files are not recovered. When the encrypted data is used in day-to-day operations, losing access to the data can be significant, especially for organizations that rely on either critical information files (legal documents, AutoCAD files, training materials, etc.) or large stores of electronic information such as patient data.
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Understanding the value of the data can help an organization decide how to proceed.
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Part II of this series investigates what actions organizations can take after an attack and what they can do to remediate its effects. Even when an organization trains its employees to guard against social engineering, disables macros and configures ad-blockers, and takes an array of other steps to protect its data, it only takes one misstep for threat actors to hold data hostage. Learn more about NetCentrics’ current cybersecurity services, including tactics to remedy ransomware.Īs discussed in Part I of this series, crypto-ransomware is quickly becoming the extortion tool of choice for cybercriminals. Part 2 of a 2-part series on Crypto-ransomwareĮditor’s Note: This two-part series was published in 2016.
