Displaying items by tag: ransomware attacks

Australia ranks number one in Asia Pacific for most ransomware attacks, and seventh globally according to new research which reveals that 37% of all attacks on Australian organisations targeted the commercial and professional services sector.

GUEST OPINION by Luke Smith, Regional Account Director, Barracuda MSP:  As Australian businesses plan for the year ahead, many are grappling with the best way to manage a constantly evolving IT security threat landscape. Indeed, research finds 83% of SMBs in Australia feel exposed to cyber threats and the figure is even higher for SMBs in New Zealand at 87%.

COMPANY NEWS: Cohesity today introduced Security Advisor, an addition to the company’s Threat Defense architecture that gives customers an easy way to improve their security posture in an era of rapidly sophisticated and damaging cyberattacks. The new feature helps reduce human errors and achieve a higher level of cyber resilience in customer environments that are managed through the Cohesity Helios data platform.

GUEST OPINION by Scott Leach, VP of APAC at Varonis:  Let’s spare a thought for cybersecurity professionals as we look into our crystal ball to see what 2022 holds. They’ll be under increasing pressure from the ‘bad guys’, and the ‘good guys’ as well. No matter what industry these professionals work in, it will become more difficult to secure data and maintain compliance with government regulations.

GUEST OPINION by Walter Manyati, Director ANZ for Qualys: As the threat of ransomware attacks continues to escalate, the crippling of high-profile organisations frequently shines the spotlight on this crisis. Yet, it’s not hard to see why – ransomware is such a lucrative business model for cybercriminals.

GUEST RESEARCH: In response to the market’s failure to provide security solutions geared toward mid-size companies, cyber security innovator Coro introduces industry-first financing program to make all-in-one, enterprise-grade cyber protection immediately accessible to every growing business.

ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corporation, has announced the addition of data loss prevention for endpoints, anti-ransomware, and endpoint compliance capabilities to its unified endpoint management (UEM) solution, Desktop Central.

GUEST RESEARCH: The SolarWinds and Kaseya attacks were devastating intrusions at the heart of IT and network management supply chains. In each case, alleged state actors were able to infiltrate the mechanisms used by the vendors to ship software updates to customers, and infect those updates with malware, including ransomware, according to industrial security company Claroty.

Be ready for any file-based data workload with Dell EMC PowerScale, the world’s most flexible scale-out NAS solution.

GUEST OPINION by David Noy, Vice President of Product Management, Unstructured Data Solutions, Dell Technologies: A new IDC research report, surveyed over 400 enterprise IT decision makers and identified the top drivers and challenges for managing unstructured data. IDC found, based on feedback from respondents, an “uber” trend in file-based storage is the need for flexibility – the ability to easily support a mix of enterprise file-based workloads and be ready for any workload including demanding and modern workloads such as AI/ML/DL or traditional use cases like file consolidation and archives. Key requirements of flexibility noted in the report include mixed media support, nondisruptive scalability, ease of public cloud integration, multiple access methods and an availability of different deployment models.

Australian organisations are struggling with network breaches, ransomware attacks, remote work, and more, according to the latest network security report from cloud security and data protection solutions vendor Barracuda.

GUEST OPINION by Derek Cowan, Director of System Engineering APAC at Cohesity:  With an unprecedented level of employees now home-working, and return to offices delayed until 2022 for many, corporate IT must navigate the digital roadblocks created by a highly dispersed team.

GUEST OPINION by Tilly Travers, Sophos: Even the most carefully planned ransomware attacks don’t always go according to plan.

GUEST OPINION by Steve Singer, Regional Vice President - Australia and New Zealand, Zscaler::It’s been a torrid year for cybersecurity infections, and the targets have been indiscriminate. It’s time we faced up to some ‘home truths’ about the situation,

Thirty-five percent of security breaches in 2020 were caused by ransomware attacks, resulting in tremendous financial cost, while between January and October last year, 730 "publicly disclosed events" resulted in over 22 billion records being exposed, according to a report from security vendor Tenable.

GUEST OPINION by Sunil Chavan, Vice President, FlashBlade, Asia Pacific & Japan, Pure Storage:  As applications that draw on file storage have grown more demanding, database applications have become more sophisticated, and the web, IoT, and demand for analytics have caused an explosion in the need for object storage.

Security firm Avast has warned that it foresees more COVID 19 vaccination scams and attacks on healthcare and pharma organisations in 2021.

There has been a spike in ransomware attacks as cybercriminals capitalise on the COVID 19 pandemic, according to a new report which found that ransomware attacks can be correlated to key days in the COVID-19 news cycle - suggesting attackers are being “nefariously opportunistic” and leverage breaking news to take advantage of vulnerable populations. 

Ransomware attacks on businesses and governments will continue at a more rapid pace, thanks to newly found security vulnerabilities, according to one global security firm which forecasts further increases in ransomware attacks and VPN “scandals” in 2020 and beyond.