Today’s ransomware attacks are more targeted, more lucrative, and potentially more damaging to organizations. In 2021, 37% of all businesses were hit by ransomware, with attacks occurring every 11 seconds. Hackers are using tactics like double extortion, where they steal a company’s data for ransom, and then threaten to leak it to increase the pressure to pay. Within the past year, over 2,000 companies were victims of ransomware attacks that led to data being exposed on the Dark Web, up a shocking 935% from the previous year. Statistics recently published by Cloudward.net paint a bleak picture on what companies are up against in the fight against ransomware.
Companies are providing their employees training in best practices to defend the data and thwart risks of a breach. Still, companies with robust security practices in place have no guarantee that their data is safe. With 85% of data breaches being caused by human error, organizations need security strategies in place that devalue the data. CISOs across all industries are recommending two main approaches to devalue the data tokenization and encryption that render data useless to fraudsters in the event of an attack.
Bluefin’s CISO, Brent Johnson, sat down with CPO Magazine to discuss the future of ransomware attacks and the importance of encryption and tokenization for masking any type of data that could be leveraged for a payout.
“In a double extortion attack, bad actors infect an organization’s network using ransomware, a subset of malware that encrypts the company’s files. The fraudsters then demand ransom in exchange for decrypting the data — but if the organization refuses to pay up, the bad actors threaten to publish the information on a DLS.”
Access the full article on CPO Magazine.
Bluefin’s integrated payment security solutions -PCI-validated point-to-point encryption (P2PE) and tokenization – ensure clear-text payment data, Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI) stays out of your system and is securely stored, making your customers’ payment information unusable on the Dark Web. Bluefin was the first company in North America to earn Payment Card Industry (PCI) validation for our point-to-point encryption (P2PE) solution in 2014. Learn more about Bluefin’s products.
