If your physician told you that you’re at risk when it came to certain health issues, you would probably do everything in your power to reduce that risk. If you were prescribed specific medication, you would be pretty careful about taking it.

Yet when it comes to the health of our company, many people inexplicably don’t take the warnings of experts seriously. There are still too many companies that are not adequately protected against the all-too-common threat of a data breach. 

Organizations ranging from large government departments all the way down to small internet startups have been victimized by data breaches and ransomware and the numbers are only going up. 

It doesn’t just happen to others. It can happen to you too – see why you need a Data Loss Protection solution. 

Data Loss Protection For Government Offices

Just last year, the Baltimore city government was infected with ransomware, proving that no organization is too big to be victimized. 

Most of the city government’s computers and servers were forcibly taken offline after being infected with a ransomware variant called RobinHood. While their systems were offline, the city began hemorrhaging money. Nearly $8 million was lost simply because the city could not process routine payments. The real estate market was significantly affected because property transfers could not be completed. 

The attackers were demanding over $75,000 worth of Bitcoin, but the real cost – nearly $10 million – was the cost incurred to fix up the city’s cybersecurity infrastructure. All of these costs might have been spared if a robust DLP solution had been in place. 

Data Loss Protection For Small Startups

Just recently, the online alcohol delivery startup Drizly reported a huge data breach resulting in millions of accounts being compromised. 

In an email to employees, Drizly admitted that a hacker accessed their system and took customer data from up to 2.5 million accounts. The data consisted of email addresses, date-of-birth information, physical addresses and even passwords.

Drzly advised their customers to change their passwords even though they maintain that no financial data was taken. TechCrunch, however, claims to have found dark web listings that show financial data was, in fact, stolen. 

Breaches and Attacks Are Getting More Common

The frequency of data breaches and ransomware attacks is rising steadily as well. Criminals are getting bolder as attacks show greater and greater success. 

Recently, for instance, a threat actor group known as ShinyHunters, started leaking tons of stolen data from various breaches for free on a hacker forum. Most of the affected companies were small startups. ShinyHunters bragged that they had already made enough money from their other criminal breaches and were now releasing stolen data for free in order to “benefit the community”.

Don’t Wait For It To Happen To You

What’s clear here is that external attackers don’t discriminate. They don’t care if you are a large organization or a small struggling startup. It doesn’t matter to them whether you have a massive IT infrastructure or a small local server. If you are vulnerable, they will exploit it. 

ITsMine’s powerful DLP solution is a necessary tool in your arsenal to protect against external threats automatically. The benefits include:  

  1. Protection against ransomware using SoftwareMine™️ technology (more on this below)  from managed and unmanaged systems
  2. Blocking infected devices that try using malware to exfiltrate data 
  3. Knowing about data breaches even beyond company boundaries and blocking important data from being used even after data exfiltration

SoftwareMines™️ act as the last line of defense. They’re dedicated fictitious files planted in sensitive locations adjacent to files that need protection. “Stepping” on a SoftwareMine™️ (i.e. opening or even tampering the file’s permissions) will immediately send an alert to the organization’s security head in order for them to take the necessary steps. 

To learn more about how ITsMine’s Beyond DLP can safeguard your data from external attackers, schedule a demo today.

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Encryption-less Ransomware: Best Practices for CISOs to Ensure Protection