Articles

Ransomware attacks growing in number, severity: Why experts believe…

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Law enforcement and federal experts discuss recent ransomware trends and challenges of fighting the attacks.
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Ransomware has become the most chronic and common threat to digital networks. At a time when 41% of all cybersecurity insurance claims flow from ransomware attacks, it’s no surprise that ransomware is top of mind for leading security experts, government officials and law enforcement leaders.

“I think ransomware is going to get worse and I hate to say it, but it’s almost the perfect crime,” Mark Weatherford, chief strategy officer and board member of the non-profit National Cyber Security Center, told attendees at the third annual Hack the Capitol event. “It’s easy to pull off and it’s almost impossible to get caught.”

While major ransomware events grab all the headlines, Weatherford worries about the smaller victims of ransomware attackers. “Small- and medium-sized businesses simply don’t have the resources or the technical acumen to understand the threat environment that they live in,” he said.

Sometimes it can seem like a ransomware attack is inevitable. “A lot of my friends in companies that I talk to on a regular basis literally are waiting for that shoe to drop when they are the victim of a big ransomware event,” Weatherford said.

This article appeared in CSO Online. To read the rest of the article please visit here.

Photo by Michael Geiger on Unsplash

Articles

Election security status: Some progress on ballot integrity, but…

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With the election less than two months away, government and election officials say voting itself is more secure, but Russian disinformation remains largely unaddressed.
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The presidential election in 2016 was a wake-up call that the security of the country’s election infrastructure can never again be considered a sure thing. During the last presidential campaign, Russia hacked into the Democratic National Committee’s network and stole emails from Clinton campaign officials while also breaking into at least two county voting systems in Florida. Those digital security attacks took place alongside destructive disinformation campaigns that ran on vulnerable and unprepared social media networks.

At this year’s Billington Cybersecurity Summit, 55 days before the next presidential election, experts weighed in on the progress, or lack thereof, that the US has made in securing America’s elections since 2016.

Chris Krebs, head of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), told attendees that three-and-a-half years after he joined the agency it has “turned the corner in a really meaningful way” on cybersecurity. “We’re working in all 50 states on a regular basis to share information, to secure their systems, to ensure that they have all the resources they need to be prepared, whether it’s a COVID environment or non-COVID environment.”

Matthew Masterson, senior cybersecurity advisor at CISA, says his group is hard at work on supporting the more than 8,800 officials who run the country’s elections. Many of the voting jurisdictions are small but many election offices represent the largest IT operations in their counties in terms of total number of assets.

This article appeared in CSO Online. To read the rest of the article please visit here.

Photo by Kari Sullivan on Unsplash