Let’s have a little fun today. Today’s blog post is written in the format of a daytime soap opera. Please make sure you read all of the dialogue as if being whispered by extremely attractive television stars and starlets!

Life goes on in the small town of Oak Falls, deep woods surrounding the little hamlet nestled on the coast of Cape Seguridad. Let’s follow the lives of some of the residents, their lives Of Vice… and Vulnerability.

One of the worst things that can happen to any organization is to be infiltrated with ransomware. Ransomware is a strain of malware that allows hackers to lock down files or computing systems and then ransom access back to the organization. It can really be a problem.

Ransomware is more than just a buzzword. It's a real and growing threat to businesses everywhere. In cities like Baltimore, ransomware attacks are on the rise. They're causing massive disruptions and costing businesses dearly.

We’ve spent the last few weeks discussing ransomware's impacts on different subsets. First, we discussed how a ransomware attack impacts the customers of the infected business, and then we touched on the infected business itself. To end, we want to touch on ransomware's impacts on society, specifically regarding economic health and geopolitical security, known as third-order harms.

Last week, we discussed the many impacts your business suffering from ransomware has on “second-order harm,” downstream businesses, and average, ordinary people. This time, we wanted to return to “first-order harms”… those the impacted business has to deal with itself.

It can be too easy to look at ransomware as a business problem. After all, it attacks businesses, locking down their data for ransom, often selling it or spreading it, and sometimes altering it for the business if returning it at all. It can be too easy to overlook another impacted target in all the mess.

What happens to the people whose data a business has collected and uses?

When considering your company’s cybersecurity, it is important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees… or, in other words, not to forget the basics around which the rest of your protections are built.

Cybercriminals are always looking for new ways to trick users and businesses into falling for their traps. With cyberthreats on the rise, and online risks becoming more detrimental to businesses, it’s definitely something that all businesses need to have protections in place for.

A new attack involves ransomware being disguised as some of the most prominent business-related software tools.

Small businesses, like any other entities, can be vulnerable to various computer scams. Scams can have an unsettling effect on how your business runs, as it always keeps doubt—even if you do everything you can to mitigate risks—to whether you are going to be the victim of a horrible Internet-based scam. Here's a list of common computer scams that small businesses should be aware of.

It’s a Tuesday morning after a long weekend. You come into the office and note that a couple employees are struggling to log into their machines. You don’t think much of it. You go to your office, set your coffee down, and try to log into your desktop. It fails. 

Your first thought is that your whole day just went sideways. That’s just the start of it.

Cybersecurity is a critical consideration for businesses to make, as it isn’t hyperbolic to say that a cyberthreat could potentially end a business. Trust me, as a business owner myself, I’m not thrilled about the reality of the situation, but it’s too important for us not to discuss.

Spam is annoying. It’s so annoying that the majority of us have just learned to accept it and tune it out. We all get physical junk mail that just gets tossed in the trash, we get bizarre text messages that we just automatically ignore, our phones ring with telemarketers and scammers. We’re so used to it, and most people feel so confident in their abilities to ignore it, that we don’t stop and ask ourselves, “Why the heck is spam still a thing?”

It’s because people DO fall for it. Spam works…and when it does, it can be devastating.

Ransomware is perhaps the nastiest threat you can encounter, and the unprepared business could potentially be crippled beyond repair if it suffers from an attack like this. We’re here to demystify the inner machinations of a ransomware attack so you know better how to respond to it.

A ransomware attack took out the computer network of Atlantic General Hospital, as was discovered on January 29th of this year. While the situation was resolved as of February 13th and the impacted departments returned to full operation, there are bound to be lasting ripples that will continue on for some time.

Ransomware takes up a significant amount of our blog, and for good reason. It’s an incredibly scary threat to find yourself on the receiving end of, and modern businesses are, to be quite frank, often unprepared to handle it. We wanted to take today as an opportunity to discuss the negative effects you can expect from a ransomware attack—effects that will make you think twice about the current level of security on your infrastructure.

Ransomware is a serious issue for businesses. How serious?

Think “$265 billion in costs by 2031” serious. In light of this, every organization needs to do everything possible to avoid falling victim to ransomware. Let’s touch on a few practices that will help.

At the end of January, the Federal Bureau of Investigation went public with an announcement that they had taken down the servers and Dark Web sites utilized by the Hive ransomware gang. This is a major victory, in terms of fighting cybercrime, but a certain statistic from this operation shows a somewhat disconcerting trend.

When cyberattacks hit close to home; when an attack affects a large number of people, it really shows you just how much risk a business could be facing by not being prepared. Over Thanksgiving, a cybersecurity incident hit the Washington County government, and as of this writing, several services are still paused while things are getting restored.

The greater Baltimore area is no stranger to cyberattacks, but recent trends are pointing to an increased rise in attacks targeting businesses throughout the area. Let’s take a look at what businesses and other organizations have been experiencing.

Smartphones have managed to hold out against ransomware a bit longer than other hardware and operating systems, but those days are coming to an end. It’s important to remember that the average smartphone is not protected with antivirus software and thus remains threatened by your standard ransomware attacks. It is absolutely critical that your business doubles down on its protection against ransomware, especially in the mobile market.