While it may seem like a bit of an over the top title, the fact is it just about sums up the situation we have found ourselves in today, in terms of malware attacks.
People like to stick their heads in the sand and think it’ll never happen to them, but it can and it does.
Let’s start with a story.
In the past 24 hours WatchPoint Data has been called to disaster zones, otherwise known as ransomware attacks, for four of our clients. In the past few years, 12% of our data backup clients have had a major breach and massive data loss, caused by ransomware. When it happens, it is literally like a bomb has gone off. A silent bomb, one that explodes across your network, so fast you can’t stop it. Panic ensues, administrators try to control the situation by pulling network cables, but it’s too late as the Trojan gallops onward, encrypting everything in its path. It is the stuff of nightmares; there is no blood, no gore, no vampires showing their fangs, but the aftermath will make your blood run cold.
Lets roll back the years a little and see how this all started.
I suppose we can blame this on the great mathematician, John von Neumann. In 1949 he wrote an article called “The Theory of Self Replicating Automata”, later published, posthumously as a book in 1966. In this article he compared natural automata, such as the human nervous system, to computing automata and made some crucial and insightful comments about how natural automata can survive in spite of a “high incidence of error (that our artificial automata are incapable of)”.
This sparked the imagination of a man called Bob Thomas who decided to test out von Neumann’s ideas by building the Creeper System, a self replicating program and the great granddaddy of today’s modern malware.
The first modern computer virus to actually be released into the wild (as it were) was written in 1982, by a then 15 year old, Rich Skrenta and named ‘Elk Cloner’. It was aimed at Apple and was pretty innocuous. If you became infected it ran a program that displayed a poem on your screen:
“Elk Cloner: The program with a personality
It will get on all your disks It will infiltrate your chips Yes it's Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue It will modify ram too Send in the Cloner! “
Two brothers, Basit and Amjad Alvi, then created a virus in 1986 called the Brain boot sector; this virus was aimed at IBM compatible PCs. Back in the day, viruses were passed by floppy disks (remember those?) so they were more containable.
Subsequently, a number of similar viruses were developed and released, including ‘Stoned’ which was again quite innocuous. But then the malicious nature of these types of computer programs came to the forefront with a virus called, ‘Michelangelo’. This virus affected the boot sector of a PC and on a certain date (the birth date of the artist, Michelangelo) it would overwrite certain sectors of your hard disk. You could retrieve the lost data, but only with expert help. It was the first virus that truly caused data and financial loss.
It wasn't really until the advent of email and the Internet that we saw the true nature of viruses, going ‘viral’ and then it started to become truly nasty. The first purported email virus was ‘Happy99’ in 1999, but again it wasn’t the money generating program that we see today. Probably the most famous email virus was the ‘I Love You’ virus. This virus was estimated to have caused at least $5.5 billion damage and around $15 billion to remove it from the 10% of internet computers across the globe that were infected.
Phishing emails have proliferated since the early 2000’s when phishers registered a large number of domain names that suggested they were eBay or PayPal or something similar. Phishing is still a major cause of data loss, identity theft and financial losses.
Ransomware has been around since the mid 2000’s, but one of the most feared, CryptoLocker and the now infamous derivation, CryptoWall, was first seen in 2013. This nasty piece of software arrives on your desk as an email attachment, or an email link, which takes you to a malicious website. Both run a program that once installed will encrypt most of your files, not just on your desktop, but across your network and into Cloud based systems too. Cryptowall is a multi-million dollar business for its developers. It is estimated the hackers coined in $1.1 million in the first 6 months after release.
Thing have been getting steadily worse and increasingly costly since then. The days of the Elk Cloner poem are long gone. The fact is malware, and in particular ransomware, are big business. It is estimated that the average phishing email generates up to $10,000 profit per 100 people that they scam. The big catch is a bank Trojan which comes directly after your money and can net the hacker on average $72,000 for every 100 people they infect. With money like that to be had, malware is on the rise, with a lot of people now getting in on the act. PandaLabs identified 20 million new strains of malware in the third quarter of 2014 alone, with over 78% of them being Trojans and they are targeting your business; they want your money.
Do not think this is something that only happens to someone else. Hackers are indiscriminate. Hackers are at war with ordinary business and we need to take action and defend ourselves. We cannot solely rely on anti-virus software anymore, it simply cannot keep up with the cascade of malware. You can’t close the door after the horse has bolted, you need defensive strategies before this happens to you.
WatchPoint is the new generation in the war against malware. We provide defense through watchfulness. We give you the armor to ensure malware doesn’t hit your business. We are your eyes and ears, closing down the entry points to malware and keeping your data, network and ultimately your business, safe. If you haven’t been infected yet, you are lucky - don’t let that luck run out.
WatchPoint has been designed specifically for the small to medium size organization and is priced to reflect this, with affordable options. Check out our price points here.
