Criminals seem to take advantage of anything that will allow them to gain more money, power, or notoriety. It seems in the last year that ransomware has become more prevalent and widespread in all sorts of organizations, though a number of governments have had high profile attacks. They’ve often paid the ransom, with the help of insurers.

While that might seem like the most expedient way to get back to working, it can be a problem, as this article points out. It can often be more expensive, in time and currency, to combat an attack than to pay a deductable and have the insurer cover the rest. When insurers start to pay for the attacks, then it provides an incentive for more attacks, especially similar attacks at governments or other corporate divisions where the security (or lack thereof) might be similar.

This also can influence more organizations to purchase insurance, which might be part of the reason insurance companies are happy to pay out the policy. I expect that insurers can’t pay all policies, so I would hope they would start to require more proactive security measures and policies to prevent attacks against some companies. In fact, I hold out hope that insurance, not government, will drive more companies and organizations to implement better security practices.

The downside is that sometimes paying the ransom doesn’t get the keys to decrypt files. In fact, I suspect that it’s as likely that the criminals don’t have the key as they just make a mistake in their “customer service” effort to provide the key. All sorts of organizations have trouble providing the right keys at times to customers, so I’d expect this happens to criminals as well. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some criminals aim to exact a second ransom, perhaps devised to be just below the insurance policy limit, before providing a key.

The takeaway for most data professionals here is that we want to be very careful with our data, especially our backups. While others might lose their data to encryption, it behooves us to severely limit access to backup files to prevent a rogue account accessing them, and certainly we would want to to air gap backups wherever possible. If we find out that systems are encrypted, at least we can recover our data on new hardware. If our application code is likewise held in another system, like GitHub or BitBucket, then we might even get back to work quicker, at least for our data-driven applications.

Security continues to be an increasing part of the data professionals job. As a way to ensure your career continues to advance and grow, pay attention to how well you secure your organization’s data.

Steve Jones

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