The recent Crystal Valley ransomware attack news, made it the second farming
cooperative attacked this past week. The well-known farming organization
disclosed that it was targeted with a ransomware attack on Sunday that led them
to shut down IT systems, preventing payments using Visa, Mastercard, and
Discover credit cards.
This attack again highlights the need for a new way of thinking when it comes to ransomware protection.
Gary Ogasawara, CTO, Cloudian adds his thoughts on the state of ransomware defensive strategies:
"Ransomware attacks will only continue to infiltrate industries and cause massive disruption if a different approach isn’t taken.
Unfortunately, when it comes to protecting against such attacks, proper education has been lacking. Throughout the rising ransomware crisis, much of the discussion has centered on perimeter security and other traditional defenses that have clearly fallen short. These strategies simply aren’t enough to combat today’s sophisticated attack landscape. In fact, a recent survey of organizations that experienced a ransomware attack found that almost 50% had perimeter defenses in place at the time of the attack but were still penetrated.
The keys to defeating ransomware are immutable (unchangeable) data backups and encryption. Data immutability prevents cybercriminals from deleting or altering data, enabling recovery of an uninfected copy in the event of an attack without having to pay ransom. Similarly, encrypting sensitive data both at rest and in flight prevents such criminals from reading or publishing this data in any intelligible form, again eliminating the need to pay ransom."
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