Cybersecurity

Theoretical Ransomware Attack Could Lead to Global Damages Says Report

According to a speculative cyber risk scenario prepared by Cambridge University for risk management purposes, a ransomware strain that would manage to impact more than 600,000 businesses worldwide within 24 hours would potentially lead to damages of billions not covered by insurers.

First of all, it is important to understand that although the numbers look very scary, this type of an attack is practically impossible to pull off at the moment when taking into consideration the current capabilities of malware, anti-malware, and current IT ecosystems.

To illustrate this point, in two of the theoretical scenarios used to create the report the malware used in the speculative global scale ransomware attack is capable of infecting machines running two operating systems, with a currently impossible to imagine "potential attack surface of 97.3% devices worldwide." 

Also, the speculative malware infection scenarios presented by this report can easily be avoided by businesses which would use off-site/offline backups of at least critical systems and data as countermeasures for this type of digital disasters.