Should a company pay ransom to hackers?
| Austin, Texas
While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are churning out digital security tools, the bad guys have kept pace.
A network breach can lead immediately to the deployment of a piece of software that encrypts your organization鈥檚 data until you pay a ransom to unlock it.聽And recognizing malicious code is no longer a simple matter of checking against known code snippets. These days, malware can shape-shift, sometimes as quickly as every few milliseconds.聽Not to mention there is just a lot more malware being hurled against the digital shields: Somewhere on the order of a quarter million聽聽are detected every day.
Enterprises should take a holistic, layered approach to security in the face of this growing criminal sophistication, said David Konetski, a Dell Fellow who spoke this week at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas (). That means employing systems that together work to predict, prevent, detect, and remediate attacks.
This comprehensive framework can frustrate business executives who wonder why one solution alone isn鈥檛 good enough.
Mr. Konetski said he sometimes gets asked, 鈥�'Why do I need something that鈥檚 going to protect 99 percent of all malware coming into my machine if I鈥檝e got the world鈥檚 best detection system?' If you pay a monitoring service, that鈥檚 great, but if you have an incident and they have to come in, put feet on the street and clean that up, it鈥檚 going to be very expensive.鈥�
Such a strategy might also wind up costing a ransom payment. If a business relies solely on detecting odd behaviors on the network, it may not move fast enough. A ransomware attack that deploys even one millisecond faster than the detection system will result in your machine getting locked, encrypted, and ransomed.
What鈥檚 the best advice for businesses who find themselves in this situation?
鈥淚鈥檝e consulted some of the foremost experts in the world on this topic, everybody from CERT [Computer Emergency Readiness Team]聽to our internal folks at SecureWorks, and you know the recommendation is to pay the ransom,鈥� said Konetski. 鈥淭his is a business. There hasn鈥檛 been any rampant fraud in that industry鈥�. You get your data back.鈥�
These talks were part of a series of discussions hosted at Passcode's booth at SXSW. See all that Passcode, Dell, Mozilla, and the Center for Democracy and Technology聽听补苍诲听.
