According to the Brussels Times, a report by the Belgian parliamentary economy committee notes that Belgian companies are paying an estimated EUR100 MM per year to criminal hackers. As claimed by a series of experts that were interviewed by the committee, almost one third of companies have experienced ransomware. Unfortunately, fearing a loss of face or reputation for the company, many do not report the matter to the police.
Many of these cases also go unreported as a result of the accessibility to ransomware insurance, which reimburses companies for some of their losses; also making it less likely that they will report the cybercrime. Unfortunately, the problem in Belgium typically concerns small and medium-sized businesses which often suffer major financial damage if they are unable to get back access to their data. Thus, many of these companies often have no choice but to pay. The current figures for the region show that the number of cases of ransomware in 2019 rose by 29% from the previous year and unfortunately, the cases are trending steeply upwards.
As we have seen elsewhere around the world, ransomware has become a big business with hardly any skill needed as hardware and software used to perpetrate this type of cybercrime is easily obtainable from hackers that offer “Ransomware-as-a-Service” to whomever is willing to pay. As a result, it is expected that cyber-fraud will continue to increase exponentially; that is, unless businesses start looking at more innovative approaches such as Real-time Threat Prevention.
“The perpetrators don’t even have to be skilled in computer science,” said Antwerp prosecutor Robrecht De Keersmaecker, chief coordinator of the Cybercrime Expertise Network.
Thankfully, Wedge’s Absolute Real-time Protection utilizes AI that doesn’t require the user to be an expert either; it can detect new and variations of ransomware automatically with its built in highly trained neural network.
The big downfall for most organizations who are using typical network security solutions is that they are often based on the old notion of “Detect and Remediate”; that basically detects the malware AFTER it has already infiltrated the network and then tries to eradicate it. By this time, in the case of ransomware, the cyber criminals have already accessed the network and has locked up key files which they can then obtain ransom for. This does not have to be the situation if companies start employing a Detect and Block, or Real-time Threat Prevention approach to their cyber security.
This is where Wedge Networks comes in. Wedge has developed the Wedge Absolute Real-time Protection (WedgeARP) orchestrated security platform that incorporates Deep Content Inspection along with AI and Machine Learning to be able to “SEE” content flowing through the network and to understand the intent of the data. This enables the solution to detect even new, never-before-seen malware, such as the ransomware variants that are being created every day. With patented high speed network data processing, WedgeARP can detect and then block all malware in real-time; stopping them BEFORE they can even access the network to do any harm.
To learn more about WedgeARP and how it can help prevent your organization from becoming another ransomware statistic, contact our team at: info@wedgenetworks.com. We offer a FREE 90 day trial to any and all organizations who are feel that they would prefer to prevent a ransomware attack than have to deal with paying out to cyber criminals.
