Ransomware

RMail’s AI enhancements are more in line with PRE-crime detection vs. e-security risk mitigation. As sophisticated cybercriminal lures become ever more ubiquitous, and the consequence of a hook-and-steal situation more costly and disruptive (think mis-wiring funds and ransomware), we at Tech Essentials are spotting a new trend very much rooted in science fiction. “Precrime”, infamous from Philip K. Dick's 1956 sci-fi short story, " [...]

Last week we highlighted two of the top five e-security human errors that can cause pain for professionals, so we’re here now to finish out the list. As you may recall, there are some mistakes that can be forgiven in the workplace (although microwaving leftover fish at 10 am is fairly borderline). However, there are those mistakes that could [...]

Get Some Rest (for Your Files) for the Rest of Your Summer As we head into one of the summer’s final weekends, I’m doing the usual exercise of wondering where all the time went. This certainly was not a restful summer for the world what with Delta variants, ransomware attacks, record-setting wildfires and now hurricanes baring in on my hometown. On a lighter note, we were also not resting at RPost in bringing you our virtual user conference and many new, groundbreaking and value-pa [...]

Don’t Be Like 7sdf8dxz0sjh-3. Get RMail. Did you hear the one about the guy who couldn’t remember his “unhackable” Gmail password, so he changed his name to 7sdf8dxz0sjh-3? Now that you’ve stopped laughing uncontrollably, we can talk about something slightly more sobering: A new ransomware attack will occur every 11 seconds this year according to Cybersecurity Ventures. The estimated total cost of these attacks? $20 billion. “Back” in 2018, 39% of ransomware victims capit [...]

RMail — DDT for Ransomware Attackers Ransomware is again in the news—this time in terms of what state and local governments are actively doing to prevent it. At least three US states—New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania—are considering legislation that would ban state and local government agencies from paying ransom if they’re attacked by cyber criminals. Interestingly, a similar bill in Texas was thrown out earlier this year. The mechanics of how the ban w [...]

Ransomware Attacks Won’t Die--Just Multiply Ransomware has become such a hot topic with a seemingly new case every day that we thought we would pick up where we left off last week... The earliest examples of ransomware (i.e., people hacking into computers, encrypting files and demanding payment in return for decryption) was relatively small potatoes—a hundred dollars here or t [...]

We Predicted the Death of Ransomware in 2017. Oh, Time Machines. We first wrote about Ransomware attacks in Tech Essentials in 2017 – back when a Bitcoin was valued at $1800 (oh, the good old days). The crux of the article was that many victims were paying their ransom to the cyber perpetrators, but they did not have an easy way to track and reconcile who paid, and m [...]

(WCry) was successful in infecting over 300,000 computers in 150 countries. It is likely the worst ransomware attack to date. WCry works by locking the files with encryption on each device. Victims are promised a decryption key to unlock their files once they pay a ransom of $300 in Bitcoin. But incredibly, as pervasive as the WannaCry attack has been, it’s creators have only collected about $80,000 in Bitcoin ransom. Less than 0.1% of the victims have paid their $300 ransom [...]