It is a very famous and eminent proverb that:
“A wise person learns from his mistakes. A wiser one learns from others’ mistakes. However, the wisest person of all learns from others’ successes.”
There are people and companies out there who have admitted to their mistakes and allowed to be shared online to prevent others from being manipulated by cybercriminals. Below, we will mention some of such mistakes that you can learn from the past cyber-terrorism victims to save your company’s time, money, brains and of course, the data and confidential information. These mistakes will also help you devise a rasomware recovery plan.
1) Selecting informal and laid-back passwords
Choosing easy passwords is only a magnet for cybercriminals to dig deeper into your data and gain easy access to it. Such passwords are insecure and publicly accessible.
The cybercriminals won’t have to go any further if you try it at home with your personal computer and you assign someone as an experiment to try and guess your password. They will go for the easiest and the quickest ones keeping you in mind. Easy passwords include:
– Your initials
– Name of a pet or loved one
– The company’s street address
– Your boss’ name
– Even if you have little sticky notes on your computer, it may be possible that a customer comes and takes a look around and somehow takes a picture of the sticky notes and guesses the password because of that. So remember NEVER to write the password on sticky notes. There could be under-cover cybercriminal looking for little clues to work their way through your system.
2) Inconsiderate, careless administrators
This is one of the biggest mistakes that victims of cyber terrorism have made. Once a cybercriminal gets hold of a careless administrator’s attention by sending out various emails through several means for his attention, the cybercriminal can quickly get into the administrator’s access. This way, eventually, the information can go as deep and as thorough as knowing even the number of pets you have (through social media accounts), the vacation places you visited, the name of your spouse and their interests and hobbies.
Having a considerate, careful administrator should be a number one priority to save yourself from cyber terrorism.
3) Untidy Server System
New companies have admitted that the biggest mistake they ever made was not to change the password that IT experts once gave them at the beginning of the setup, which was as easy as “1234” or the name of the country they were residing in.
Due to lack of time and money as well as resources, (or could be the sloppiness of the company’s IT expert), the new companies admitted that they didn’t worry much, weren’t copious enough about the server setup once it had been activated and ran successfully. They tend to forget, and this leaves the biggest hole in their system for the cybercriminals to implant their ways and make your ransomware recovery plan a failure.
