The two recent global ransomware WannaCry and Petya have sent shivers down the spine of organisations in particular and PC users in general. The very idea that a hacker sitting in a remote corner of the world can lock your computer up and demand for ransom money to release the data back.

We have seen instances of organisations and people paying digital currencies to get their data back. Check Point Software Technologies, Inc., says it is not the end of the world. It claims that one can retrieve every file that has been encrypted by the hacker using the ransomware.

“The attacks are bound to happen as someone in the organisation is going to click a malicious attachment. You can’t prevent it. But we can take remedial measures so that you don’t lose data,” Venugopal N, Pre-Sales Director (India and SAARC), told BusinessLine .

He said WannaCry-like ransomware attacks would continue to happen and it would be difficult to pre-empt them. “We will help you identify the attack which could have led to the encryption of the files. But we can get back every file that is encrypted,” he said.

He was here to attend the Data Security Council of India (DSC) conference on Cyber Resilience and Privacy Challenges in a Digital World here.

He said 91 per cent of cyber attacks started with a phishing email. The average time to detect a security breach was found to be 4.9 months. This meant it would take organisations a long time after the attack and damaged, if any, happened. He pointed out that anti-ransomware protection is not the same as anti-virus solutions. Ransomware protection would mean security from unknown and real-time threats, while anti-virus solutions took care of known threats.

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW