Ransomware Special Reports

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Special Report

within the comms team, but the main thing to ensure is that you have a spokesperson if an attack occurs and prepare content for a quick response to keep them informed. Ransomware operators have the upper hand when the authorities are not notified, so it’s also recommended to contact law enforcement too – while taking measures not alert the hackers. Post incident, as soon as the main threat has passed, organisations are advised to conduct a full retrospective audit, “ideally without blame or scape - goats, and share their findings and steps taken with the world,” according to Jack Garnsey, security awareness training product managers at VIPRE. He adds: “Often, many ransomware at - tacks go unreported – and this is where a lot of criminal power lies. Full disclo - sure is helpful – not only for customers but also for other organisations – to understand how they can prevent an attack of this type from being success - ful again.”

All at Sea Scottish marine equipment firm Oceanscan works with the oil and gas, petrochemical, defence, and nuclear industries, serving over 1,000 customers across the globe In September 2021, Oceanscan was victim of a sophisticated ransom- ware attack, encrypting multiple file layers and putting the company at risk of potential downtime and lost revenue. “Everyone’s initial thought is, ‘We are doomed.’ If attackers can infect organisations like the Pentagon and the CIA, then what is Oceanscan? Nothing,” said head of IT Sukumar Panchanathan. But the firm was partnered with disaster recovery provider iland in preparation for this very scenario. Using US-based iland’s disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and cloud backup system, Oceanscan had the security, replication and failover capabilities it needed to ensure the company’s data stayed online and available. With the company’s on-premise environment compromised, but its workloads already successfully replicated to the cloud following the attack, Oceanscan decided to move away from its on-premise pro- duction environment entirely following the attack and leverage iland’s cloud-based infrastructure, transforming the business.

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