The Expert Podcast

So how bad is the cybersecurity risk? Well, it's good news for hackers and bad news for businesses. Ransomware is on track for its highest grossing year ever, and the average is also higher. So if you're a business, be aware that the risk and the amount of losses have quintupled—five times what it was at one point. Here are the numbers buried in the article: the median ransom payment in 2023 was $200,000. So if you got hacked at your company, the median amount they would ask for is $200,000 to unlock your system.

Six months later, in 2024, now it's $1.5 million. So the hackers are getting bold; they know that it's easy picking getting this money. It was too easy for them to get to $200,000, so they kept raising it up. Is it working? Yes. The amount that they've received in 2024 is $75 million, whereas in all of 2023, they got half that in the whole year. Actually, that's not true—that's the largest ransom payment that was made, and that was for the Dark Angels attack.

Ransomware gangs have been demanding larger payouts—that's the key right there: larger payouts. So be aware, if you're a company, they see you as a fat cat; they see you as a pot of gold. They're going to go after your company. It's easy to prevent these attacks. Every single ransomware attack we've investigated and looked at, we have discovered it was preventable. The ways to prevent it are actually not that hard. It's active monitoring, some best practices, and having a response team. Sometimes if you respond quickly enough, even after the attack launches, you can prevent the majority of damage if you have a very quick response team.

We've talked about in prior videos how to do that. So those three factors in your business will make all the difference in the world: best practices on an ongoing basis—that's easy to do; active monitoring—that's almost a no-brainer, done behind the scenes; and having a response team—you have to run drills on that occasionally, maybe three or four times a year. Run a drill on your response, but that's not hard to do either. That will keep you from being in the nightmare scenario of waking up one day, going to work, and finding your whole system is locked down where you can't get to your customers, your bank account, your payroll, and having to scramble for a week or two out of business to get back on track.

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