A Sad Story: Don't Invest, Just Prodigalize

Last week, a friend called me, gave some bad news about a company. The company was looking for help since they became a victim of Egregor ransomware and trying to learn what to do against attacker since the attacker got their all data, encrypted it and gave three days to be paid 500k dollars. The attacker threatened them to publish their data in public in three days. Meanwhile, the only problem was not that all data would be published publicly, but also they lost all their private data. But, how can it be possible?

Ransomware is the biggest problem of the cyber world for some years. We heard about it, work on it and have seen paid bitcoins too much in these years. There are tens (or maybe hundreds) of webinars, talks and articles about it, trying to help about being safe against ransomware. It is ok while the weakest link is human, it is possible to be exposed a ransomware but it is not too difficult to confine it to a small area. 

The company I told about above was a chemical company and of course has too many private data like formulas. I mean they also lost their backups while I am saying they lost all their data. Since, they did not isolate their backup network, their backups was also being encrypted. Meanwhile, they have some backup tapes but cannot use them because they have never tested whether the backup tapes working, and of course they did not when the company need them. 

There are some basic prevention steps against ransomware. If we mention briefly, we can say user awareness, regular phishing tests, not only an anti-spam product but also a sandbox or another technology against malicious emails, EDR to response faster against a malicious behavior, NDR to determine the anomaly in the network, to backup data and test these backups regularly, to isolate backup network so infiltrated attackers cannot harm backups, to isolate private data and apply need to know, to limit users' internet access, and more. the list seems too long but most of them do not require much expenditure. But it if you do not invest to professionals and to any technology, then you just prodigalize your money. However, you can never count lost reputation and also secret formulas and data. 

All these measures can take too much. I can understand if a company cannot invest all of them for security. But as I said above, this company's backup network is not isolated and can be accessed from all other networks. And, as I learnt, they only use an antivirus software but it is not up to date, and I am sure they do not track whether all PCs or servers have this antivirus. So, like these measures, most of them are not expensive. To have these measures at least, every company needs to invest talented security professionals to save money. However, I think, any of these measures cost more than 500k$ + reputation + publicly published private data. To invest security is not wasting money. It is directly saving money. Everyone needs to understand this without living.