Threat Spotlight webinar: Ransomware on the rise

Ransomware continues to be a wildly popular way to attack organizations of all types and sizes and extort big money from them. In the first half of 2022, the number of attacks detected spiked to an eye-popping 1.2 million per month.

Considering the hundreds of millions of dollars that ransomware crooks get from their victims every year, it’s critical for anyone in IT security to keep abreast of the newest ways that cybercriminals work to deploy ransomware in your network.

To help with that, Barracuda has released its newest Threat Spotlight report, focused on the latest developments in ransomware tactics and how to combat them. It’s filled with information that you can use to accurately gauge your organization’s exposure to today’s ransomware threats and effectively mitigate risks.

New strategies, new attack vectors

The upcoming webinar will be co-presented by Barracuda CTO Fleming Shi and Principal Product Marketing Manager Stasia Hurley, who will jointly provide a guided tour of the report’s key insights and takeaways. Here are just a few of the things you’ll find out if you attend:

• Why the healthcare and education industries experienced unusually sharp increases in ransomware attacks during the past year
• How criminals are increasingly targeting large organizations by first penetrating smaller, less well-defended networks and using them as a springboard to attack partners, vendors, and others
• Why VPN systems with inadequate user-authentication schemes continue to be a favored point of attack for ransomware criminals
• Why application-based ransomware attacks are on the rise, even as email remains the top vector

Learning from real-world attacks

One of the challenges for anyone seeking information about ransomware attacks is the fact that many organizations are reluctant to publicly reveal that they’ve been successfully attacked and share the story of their response and how much (if anything) they paid in ransom.

At the webinar, Fleming and Stasia will walk you through a detailed discussion of three different real-world ransomware attacks that took place in the past year. You’ll see the different ways that attackers penetrated their victims’ networks, how long they were able to reside undetected within those networks, and how the organizations responded to the incidents once they were detected.

Examples will include victims who were poorly prepared and suffered the consequences, as well as those who had solid defensive plans in place and were able to avoid significant costs.

How to minimize risks

As part of the presentation, Stasia and Fleming will also explain some of the tools and strategies you can use to minimize the ransomware risk to your organizations, such as:

• Strengthening VPN authentication by implementing multi-factor authentication or (even better) a zero-trust network access solution such as Barracuda CloudGen Access
• Using a backup system, such as Barracuda Backup, that is protected against sophisticated attacks that seek to find, infect, and encrypt your backups to prevent fast and easy recovery of compromised data
• Implementing network segmentation in order to limit the spread of a ransomware infection to only a small portion of your data

Attending this webinar is one of the best things you can do to help you understand how ransomware crooks are evolving their attacks and plan out the steps you need to take to harden your security profile. Register now to reserve your spot.

Free webinar

Threat Spotlight: Ransomware in 2022

Thursday, September 29, 2022

10 a.m. – 11 a.m. PT

Save your spot today