Page 24 - Cyber Warnings

WannaCry/Ransomware? Secure your Enterprise Using

Blockchain-Enabled Cybersecurity

by Narayan Neelakantan, Co-Founder and CEO, Block Armour

Ransomware has fueled a new wave of cybercrime against organizations. While ransomware
targets both enterprises as well as individuals, the former offers a far higher level of profitability.
With every passing day, attackers are launching more phishing campaigns, engineering new
exploit kits and releasing new variants of ransomware to target organizations and hold their data
ransom.

A successful ransomware attack can not only cause businesses financial damage due to the
ransom payout, but also cause significant economic losses due to business disruption caused
by locking out vital information, and subsequently, due to the negative impact on reputation
leading to a loss of customers in the aftermath of an attack.

The recent rampage of WannaCry succeeded in taking ransomware out of the domain of
cybersecurity and raising widespread awareness about cybercrime and how it affects not just
organizations, but also individual users.

While its perpetrators only managed to collect around $100,000 in ransom, it succeeded in
causing nearly $8 billion of economic losses to businesses in almost 200 countries, and has
now come to be known as the world’s largest cyberattack.

As more enterprises undergo digital transformation, the value of data continues to increase.
While automation enables faster and more scalable operations, digital data becomes even more
critical to an enterprise’s functioning.

Existing cybersecurity solutions like strong firewalls and antivirus programs could not keep
WannaCry from infecting enterprise networks and systems, which went on to successfully lock
out users from their data and demand ransom in Bitcoins. The need of the hour is for solutions
that offer a new and evolved approach in guarding against more sophisticated cyberthreats.

Blockchain could offer a future-ready mechanism for enterprises to protect their networks and
critical infrastructure from emerging cyberthreats like ransomware. The WannaCry ransomware
attack exploited a dated, unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Windows to infect its users.

Over 67% of the systems infected by WannaCry ran on Windows 7 – a significantly older, but
still commonly used OS. This attack illustrates how easy it is for cybercriminals to take
advantage of legacy hardware, ineffective IT policies and disconnected interactions between IT
and business functions within an organization.

The advantage of enabling a blockchain-based cybersecurity is that even if data is accessed by
legacy hardware, its decentralized nature of data storage prevents organizations from having a
single point of failure, which can be targeted and attacked by hackers.

24 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – June 2017 Edition
Copyright © Cyber Defense Magazine, All rights reserved worldwide