Ransomware

After reading the recent FBI report on the state of email related cybercrime in 2022, one statistic popped out at me, when correlating different parts of the report related to Business Email Compromise and Ransomware. 

We’ve had a few days of insightful discussions at the world’s largest legal IT security event, ILTA LegalSEC. Since many of you are not able to (or not in the right frame of mind to) travel to beautiful Baltimore to experience this event live, I thought I would dedicate this week’s Tech Essentials to sharing the top three FBI-special-agent speaker insights (from my perspective).

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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…

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 […]

(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.