How to combat ransomware with visibility

From helpnetsecurity.com

In the first half of 2021, average ransomware demands surged by 518%, while payments climbed by 82%. There has been a growing number of attacks in healthcare, with 560 healthcare facilities hit by ransomware last year in the U.S. alone.

As new attacks generate headlines each week, we get real-world use cases for how ransomware proliferates in diverse ways, including social engineering attacks and exploitation of vulnerabilities. These incidents not only cost millions of dollars in recovery, but they also have led to delays in patient treatment and possibly even loss of life.

In addition to working with Netskope’s healthcare customers, I also run our corporate security operations, so I’m obviously concerned about ransomware myself—what could happen, how it might be triggered, and its impact on the organization.

With ransomware so rampant, organizations are starting to focus on what other layers can be put in place to combat the attacks. Most organizations start with basic email security, deploying a secure email gateway (SEG)—but that only gets you so far. There will always be a way for an attacker to push a link or a file that gets past these controls, so we must look at attack vectors holistically.

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