Take steps to avoid a hostage situation (for your data)

Large businesses aren’t the only ones to become targets for these types of crimes. Cyber criminals are now stealing an average of $25 million per year through ransom attacks, which also cause an average of 10 days of down-time for each victim. (Metro News Service photo)

Large businesses aren’t the only ones to become targets for these types of crimes. Cyber criminals are now stealing an average of $25 million per year through ransom attacks, which also cause an average of 10 days of down-time for each victim. (Metro News Service photo)
Local News
By Staff Sgt. Wesley Krueger
Updated Oct 18, 2019
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Hackers find new ways to get paid. A recent trend in the hacking community is that hackers will utilize encryption-based attacks on data and hold it ransom. With a new victim affected every 14 seconds, hackers will then ransom the decryption key to the victim, usually based on how much they can actually pay.

Because of this, large businesses aren’t the only ones to become targets for these types of crimes. Cyber criminals are now stealing an average of $25 million per year through ransom attacks, which also cause an average of 10 days of down-time for each victim. In some cases, the decryption key isn’t released despite paying the ransom.

How can you protect yourself against this kind of attack? There are two areas you can focus on: having good cybersecurity practices and having a backup/restoral plan. Many cyber-attacks are successful due to poor cybersecurity practices; a data hostage situation is less likely to happen if you have good defense to prevent it in the first place.

A perfect defense doesn’t exist, however. So ensuring your data is backed up can help you recover from a total loss of data.

When building a backup strategy, you need to determine what your most important data is, what data you will need to maintain functionality and how much storage it will take. Remember, the more data you back up, the more time, space, and money it will take to back up everything.

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Find out how old your data can get before it becomes obsolete or irrelevant to learn how often you should back up your data; and to determine if a manual or automatic method will suit your needs. Keep the backup separate from your system, a backup is useless if it also gets encrypted in an attack.

Test your plan. Like an emergency response plan, it should be practiced occasionally to make sure that it works. It isn’t a very good feeling to have a plan in place that fails as soon as the emergency happens. Practicing data recovery can also give you an idea of how much downtime you will experience and suggestions for how to improve the plan.

Annually, the 88th Air Base Wing Cybersecurity Office (WCO) partners with the Air Force Institute of Technology, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center and others to host National Cybersecurity Awareness Month events for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. If you are interested in a wide array of cybersecurity topics, sign up for one of the classes offered during October at the NCSAM class registration site at https://cs2.eis.af.mil/sites/er/0204/SitePages/Home.aspx.

If you have questions, contact the 88th Air Base Wing Cybersecurity Office at 88ABW.cybersecurity@us.af.mil or visit the WCO site at https://cs2.eis.af.mil/sites/22629/default.aspx.

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About the Author

Staff Sgt. Wesley Krueger