What “The Exorcist” Teaches Us About Ransomware

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As we head to Las Vegas for Black Hat 2019 this week, I think our industry needs to re-focus on the fact that ransomware still presents a significant threat, and that our current approaches to thwarting that threat are not working. 

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the ransomware attacks against three Florida cities that cost at least one person their job. Since then, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards was forced to activate a state of emergency after ransomware took down three school districts’ IT systems, and a separate attack bricked laptops installed in Georgia state police vehicles.

I don’t know the specifics of each case — maybe the Florida municipal employee who was fired acted negligently and the firing is justified. But as I wrote in a recent article for ITSP Magazine, these cases remind me of a line in the climactic scene of the classic horror movie “The Exorcist” – and the key lesson it holds for all security professionals. 

The article is up now, check it out here: “What “The Exorcist” Teaches Us About Ransomware Attacks.”

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Rene Kolga is Senior Director of Product and Marketing at Nyotron, the developer of PARANOID, the industry’s first OS-Centric Positive Security solution to strengthen your AV or NGAV protection. By mapping legitimate operating system behavior, PARANOID understands all the normative ways that may lead to damage and is completely agnostic to threats and attack vectors. When an attack attempts to delete, exfiltrate or encrypt files (among other things), PARANOID blocks them in real-time.

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