Ransomware
Ransomware reportedly to blame for outage at US hospital chain
Health care provider Universal Health Services, one of the largest chains in the US, has been hit by an apparent ransomware attack, TechCrunch reported. UHS facilities in California, Florida, North Dakota, Arizona, and other locations began noticing problems early Sunday, with some locations reporting locked computers and phone systems. Some UHS hospitals had to use pen and paper to file patient information as a result, according to NBC News. The hospital system, which has more than 400 locations in the US and the UK, said in a statement on Monday that its IT network across several facilities was offline “due to an IT security issue.” No patient or employee data appears to have been compromised, according to the statement, which did not mention malware or ransomware. “We implement extensiv...
60% of South African Organisations Fall Victim to Cybersecurity Incidents
Sourced from Forbes Six in ten (60%) organisations from South Africa experienced a public cloud security incident in the last year – including ransomware (25%), other malware (28%), exposed data (28%), compromised accounts (27%), and cryptojacking (26%) – according to The State of Cloud Security 2020 from Sophos. Globally, organisations running multi-cloud environments are greater than 50% more likely to suffer a cloud security incident than those running a single cloud. Europeans suffered the lowest percentage of security incidents in the cloud, an indicator that compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines are helping to protect organisations from being compromised. India, on the other hand, fared the worst, with 93% of organisations being hit by an attack in the ...
South African Organisations Lag Behind Global Average of Cybersecurity Resilience
Email and data security company, Mimecast, unveiled its fourth-annual State of Email Security 2020 report. This report summarises details from 1,025 global IT decision-makers on the current state of cybersecurity. The findings in this year’s report demonstrate that despite high levels of confidence in respondents’ cyber resilience strategies, there is a clear need for improvement. While a large majority (77%) of respondents say they have or are actively rolling out a cyber resilience strategy, only 62% of South African organisations are doing the same. Yet an astounding 47% of local organisations – and 60% of global ones – believe it is inevitable or likely they will suffer from an email-borne attack in the coming year. South African respondents cite data loss (35%), a decrease in employee...
One-in-Three Ransomware Attacks Target Corporate Users
Sourced from Kaspersky On May 12, 2017, the largest ransomware epidemic in history, WannaCry, reached its peak. Three years later, this and other ransomware threats are still affecting people and companies. Recent Kaspersky research has revealed that in 2019, WannaCry kept its position at the top of the most prevalent ransomware families, while almost a third (30%) of those targeted by ransomware were corporate users. On 12 May 2020, Kaspersky and INTERPOL continue to urge organisations to think about backing up their data and adopting relevant protection so that they could avoid any potential ransomware siege and a catastrophe similar to WannaCry doesn’t happen again. Ransomware has become a big challenge for many organisations. Even though this is not the most advanced threat from a tech...
