The Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report 2018 was released recently and it has revealed some interesting outcomes in the trends and statistics of cyber-attacks that have occurred over the last year. There were 53,308 separate security incidents that were used to collate the statistics.

An interesting fact to take from the data breach report is that Ransomware has been labelled the most popular form of malicious software. It was found to be the culprit in around 39 percent of incidents where malware was identified.

We first saw ransomware spring onto the scene in 2013 and ever since then, its use has been growing exponentially. This is due to the effectiveness it has at taking money from victims while keeping the criminal anonymous. No real technical talent is required either. Criminals anywhere in the world can download entire toolkits which enable them to deploy ransomware in just a few minutes. Then they can just sit back and wait for organisations to give in to their demands and pay them via Bitcoin.

IT professionals and business directors everywhere now have an ingrained fear of ransomware. The horror stories of how badly it can corrupt your organisation are not for light reading. The only way to ensure you don’t become the next victim is by taking preventative measures. Don’t wait until it’s too late! The Verizon data breach report has shown that these problems are only going to increase in severity as time goes on. Small businesses are also the most common target, as you can see below, for malware attacks as they are often seen as easy targets. The fact is, they need cyber-security just as much as large corporations.

At Tesrex, when businesses come to us asking for greater security measures in regards to protecting against malware, there are a few products within the Cisco Security portfolio we recommend.

The first is Cisco AMP. Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) is a next-generation endpoint security platform that that prevents malware breaches across your network, continuously monitors all file behaviour inside your network, and blocks and remediates advanced malware across all endpoints quickly and automatically. You can read more about it here.

The second is Cisco Umbrella. Umbrella is your way of protecting your networks users even when they are connecting from locations all over the world with devices that belong to them. Threats are getting smarter but attackers often reuse infrastructure in multiple attacks. These leave cyber fingerprints. Umbrella can detect these fingerprints and uncover attacks across the internet before they even launch. You can read more about it here.

Another point that was evident in the report was that attacks are moving to more business critical systems that encrypt file servers and databases. Security software has historically never been able to detect malware within encrypted traffic. However Cisco recently released Stealthwatch.

Stealthwatch is the third and final product we recommend in order to combat ransomware. Stealthwatch features Encrypted Traffic Analytics (ETA) which is a revolutionary feature meaning that malware has nowhere to hide in your network. You can read more about it here.

To read the full Verizon Data Breach Report click here.