Ransomware is one of the most expensive cyber crimes because of the problems it imposes on your business. It is essential to know some of these problems that you can expect with this particular cyberattack that causes your business.
Downtime
Most of the losses caused by a ransomware attack are losses related to downtime because the attack can bring down your business for days or even weeks. Depending on the nature of your business, that downtime can end up costing your business a considerable amount of cash.
Reputation Damage
Ransomware also causes severe reputational damage to any business. During a ransomware attack may not be possible even to ascertain that customer data is not stolen. That causes significant uncertainty from your customers and an impact on the business. Most consumers will think that it is safer to move and carry out business with a different company rather than trusting their information with the current company.
Cybersecurity is becoming essential as there are groups that collect data and share how different businesses have been attacked. That means for companies to be on the safe side, they have to think of how to protect themselves from attacks and restore confidence if ever attacked.
Upgrade Costs
Because businesses need to protect their image, they go a long way to implement costly upgrades as part of their security measures. When a company is attacked, many times it will spend a substantial amount of money making an overhaul of everything that looks vulnerable. That means changing any software or anything else that could be vulnerable to attacks, which is not a small cost.
Layered Extortion
We aren’t going to lecture you once again by defining ransomware and all that. What we are going to do is pose a simple question:
Let’s say that you are infected, and to keep your data from being deleted, your business elects to pay up. However, what guarantee do you have that the cybercriminals will keep up their end of the bargain and release the data they have encrypted, rather than keep it or share it on the Dark Web?
Frankly, you don’t—and knowing this, many cybercriminals have begun to steal data before encrypting it, adding the idea of data exposure to their target’s list of concerns. Class-action lawsuits are a real possibility if a business’ entire client list were to have their personally identifiable and sensitive information disclosed online.
Price of Ransom
The price of ransom to restore the business may not be any different from setting the business from scratch. You also do not know whether the criminals will return your data condition. With those uncertainties, the best thing is to take precautions and protect your business. Otherwise, redeeming it from criminals is very costly, and you are not sure it will be the way it was initially.
