TN Alert: Florida Ransomware Attack
The City of Riviera Beach, Florida is the latest ransomware attack victim in a string of high-profile phishing attacks striking US cities and businesses. Learn how this costly attack happened and how to keep it from happening to you in our latest TNTV Alerts video featuring Todd Budde, Director of Managed Services at ThrottleNet, Inc.
Video Transcript
In this week’s episode, we have a TnTV Alert about a recent ransomware attack in Riviera Beach, Florida. High-profile phishing attacks have been sweeping the country and all businesses are susceptible to it. It is crucial to understand how this attack happened in order to learn how to prevent it from happening to your own company. We are here today with ThrottleNet’s Director of Managed Services, Todd Budde, to discuss the details of this disaster, what measures you can take to prevent it, and how ThrottleNet can assist with these efforts.
What Happened?
About 3 weeks ago, a police department in Riviera Beach, Florida suffered from a major breach in their security. Hackers sent an email to one of the department’s employees and a malicious link within the email was clicked on. After the link was clicked, all of the department’s files became encrypted and locked leading to their entire email system being shut down. For the past couple of weeks, this Florida police department has been without any access to their emails or files.
This phishing attack hit the department hard at a whopping $600,000 ransom, that’s roughly 65 Bitcoins. Todd Budde thinks that the ransom was originally low, but when the hackers realized they had a significant hold on the police department, they raised the ransom greatly after the city had to respond.
As technology has continued to develop, so have different means of hacking into systems. Increased hacking and phishing leads to a need for an increase in security. Don’t let your company suffer this costly mistake of not protecting your digital network.
No one wants to go through the trauma of experiencing a ransomware attack. It will cost your company greatly and it is hard to recover from. It is important to understand the most common reasons how a company can get attacked and what to do to stop it from happening again. The most common reason as to how companies experience a breach in their security is through their own employees’ negligence. The weakest link in the security of your network is the users who are on it. To try and stop phishing and ransomware all together, the best method of prevention is employee training. Developing an ongoing training program for your company will strengthen their knowledge on how to look out for suspicious emails and other tactics on how to avoid security problems. The first and most efficient way of preventing any ransomware attack is through employee training. ThrottleNet will provide your company with a training initiative and a variety of high-quality tools to decrease the risk of phishing. ThrottleNet offers a live simulation that simulates a live phishing campaign against your company with a final report of the outcome. We will evaluate what links your employees click on most often and if there are any specific areas that need to be more closely monitored. We will teach you skills of how to look out for any malicious outside input that may be trying to get inside of your business. Along with training, ThrottleNet will provide your company with tactful tools to help in the prevention of security attacks. We have tools that will place files within your employee’s folders that will automatically be isolated and locked out of the rest of your network in case a disaster were to present itself. This tool helps in preventing the spread of the ransomware and cuts it off at the source from getting to the rest of the network. Another successful tool that we offer at ThrottleNet is DNS filtering which prevents your employees from visiting malicious websites. You have no control over what websites and links your employees are navigating through during the workday. If you are prepared for a disaster such as a ransomware attack, then there will be no disaster. Again, the advanced tools that ThrottleNet can provide to your company in the prevention of a security attack include: Disaster is never expected and can happen to any business. Be prepared before disaster strikes so your company will not lose money, time, investments, and important data. Take action by increasing your network’s security so what happened to the police department in Riviera Beach, Florida does not happen to you.How ThrottleNet Can Help
Training
Security Tools
If you’d like more information on how ThrottleNet can assist you in avoiding attacks similar to this and how we assist organizations in doing so, give us a call today!
