Ransomware On The Rise

Last month Revil, a hacking syndicate, simultaneously hacked 200 companies at once.

Furthermore, the pace of attacks is relentless. I personally believe that what will happen in the future as large companies get backing and protection from their governments is that the hacking groups will turn to smaller companies who don’t get that same kind of attention. It’s also my belief that small companies, if attacked with ransomware, would simply rather pay the ransom and will do so quietly and then improve their security after the tears.

Even at here at Sperry Software we have software that monitors the number of attacks that occur and get a report every 24 hours. We can see in near real-time the attempts to penetrate our own networks. Fortunately the software we use is working well, and we are somewhat adept at spotting fake emails.

One way to prevent yourself or other users from falling victim to the dangers of ransomware is to learn to not click links in phishing emails. This is because when a malicious link is clicked on, nothing happens immediately. In fact, it sometimes takes months for the ransomware to worm its way into the network, as in the REvil case mentioned above.

Here at Sperry Software, we already have the Phishing Net for Office 365 app that will allow you to easily forward suspected emails to your corporate security officer, or other national Phishing/SPAM databases. This is important, and so it’s free.

But in light of the severity and increasing frequency of recent attacks, and knowing that attacks almost always start with a user clicking a link, we’d like to improve the Phishing Net for Office 365 app to have several features that would help users to better detect a suspect phishing email.

With that in mind, please take our one question poll to vote on this and 4 other upcoming features for this product to help drive it forward. You don’t need to be using it now to answer the ONE question.

Together, we can help slow down this rise in phishing email attacks.

Next month, we’ll bring you the results of the poll (if enough people have responded) and let you know which of the features will be implemented first.