Among the highest profile ransomware attacks that have occurred in the nation include those of February 2016. Here we had witnessed the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center paying $17,000 in Bitcoin to the perpetrators so they could retrieve their lost data.
Since then, there have been attacks that varied in size and some even demanded ransom payments of seven figures for ransomware removal. The average figure of these demands still stands at $10,000. This is because the trend found by securityinfowatch.com signified that small to medium-sized businesses are the biggest targets for such criminal activities.
This trend is noticed for a set of obvious reasons which firstly include the fact that the small business market itself is quite large – constituting to a larger number of potential targets. Small businesses – which consist of companies that are able to generate a revenue of less than $1 bn in a year – account for somewhere close to 99% of all the companies in the nation – which in turn in very close to half the GDP contribution.
The first 9 months of 2018 had seen 71% of these companies approaching ransomware removal companies because of breach incidents. This leads to the second reason why small businesses tend to be the biggest targets. They are much less likely to have backed up their data – which is why they need to pay the ransom to have the business running smoothly.
Lastly, the obvious reason as to why these businesses tend to be targets is because they are much less likely to withstand this level of sophisticated and premeditated attacks. It’s not like these companies haven’t taken measures for ransomware removal – they do have decent lines of firewalls. The problem, however, is that malware is so advanced now that it can even deploy instructions to a company’s server to disable available back-ups of data!
Fortunately enough, there is a lot of information and services out there that can help small businesses prevent such attacks. So if you are a small business owner, you better up your cyber-security game before it is too late.
