Short posts about the industry’s leading CyberThreats and a strategy to protect yourself.

Don’t trust your staff and don’t trust yourself! This biggest risks to your organization are the humans that make it function day in and day out. The biggest risk to your organization isn’t some genius hacker in a hoodie, it’s the humans who click, plug in, and have admin rights. Ransomware isn’t a question of if, but when unless leadership stops treating technology like a cost center.

In today’s digital age, cybersecurity threats are evolving faster than ever, and businesses of all sizes are feeling the impact. From ransomware attacks to vulnerabilities created by hybrid and remote workforces, organizations need a proactive approach to cybersecurity that covers dynamic environment of their technology infrastructure.

Many organizations are often not prepared to handle a cyber security event. It is usually post-incident when the leadership begins to understand why investing in prevention would have mattered. A very expensive “too little too late” moment that could have been prevented with a shift in perspective, budget and culture.

Below is the first of many posts in this series about the various threat vectors businesses, organizations and even non-profits are affected by.

Ransomware and Malware Attacks:

Ransomware is one of the most pervasive cybersecurity threats in the digital age. Cybercriminals use malicious software to lock a business’s systems or encrypt data, demanding payment for release. Some of that customer data may be sensitive enough to warrant a lawsuit against your organization.

Critical data housed on servers such as SQL databases, application servers and file shares that are the literal drivers of productivity are a prime target for bad actors. The impact? Operations cease, revenues suffer, customers are inconvenienced or worse, they too are compromised. The cascading effect can be very dramatic and possibly ruin a company for good.

How to prevent this?

Staying focused on ransomware and malware attacks: some first steps to prevent a worst-case scenario laid out above is a shift in the mentality of leaders and decision makers. Prevention starts at the top of the organization. A perception change that views technology infrastructure spending as an investment for the future of the organization and not an expense that just increases convenience. The decision makers must be bought into a vision of safety, security, prevention and planning. With their buy in, a culture of security can take root at the lower levels of the organization and reinforce the next stage of prevention.

Culture alone is not enough. A curated and tested set of processes, software, and backups, implemented and managed by a team of experienced technicians is your best defense against the most sophisticated attacks. Here is a list of some strategies to consider.

1. Enforce automated patching with a tool like Microsoft Intune, WSUS, or a proper RMM. Unpatched vulnerabilities are still the #1 infection vector in 2024/2025.This will help keep vulnerable software from becoming an attack vector.
2. Updating systems to windows 11 from 10. Windows 10 is now deprecated and unsupported
3. Replacing old, unsupported and outdated hardware.
4. Implement monitoring software that track user devices/endpoints for malicious code and behaviors.
5. A backup solution that houses your data both locally and off site (in the cloud). This is your “break glass” plan in case all other protective measures fail.

There are many more considerations for prevention that overlap in the coming articles in this series. Tag the decision-maker who still thinks cybersecurity is “an IT problem.”

Up next: Phishing and Social Engineering