Are You Still Using Ransomware Friendly Anti-Virus?

Mid-market and Large Firms Have Already Moved Away From Legacy Anti-Virus and Switched To Next-Generation Endpoint Protection To Escape Ransomware Infection, Why Are You Still Doing It The Old Way?

It was early days for Ransomware, Malware, and non-Malware exploits. Legacy Antivirus could carry the load. Fast forward to today, more than half of businesses blame their outdated Anti-Virus systems from not preventing Ransomware attacks.  Is your Legacy Anti-Virus one of them?

Can you afford a $1 million recovery?

$900,000 a year, is the average cost an individual company spends, on the Ransomware attack, paying the ransom monies, time used to respond, and productive labor time lost. In the US alone, the lost work time equals 44-man hours, responding to an attack, from attack to complete recovery.

That’s over a full time equivalent labor for one employee for a week.  That means you could have saved that money or had an additional headcount instead.

Do you know the percentages your Partners and Supply Chain suffered from your infestation?

Let’s look at those numbers SentinelOne provided:

  • 46% Downtime – Your Partners and third-party vendors suffered;
  • 35% Loss of productivity – Your Partners and third-party vendors suffered;
  • 20% Loss of revenue – Your Partners and third-party vendors suffered.

So, who’s to blame?

Worthless legacy antivirus software? Careless employees? Decision makers? Yes. All three have a hand in it. And we’ll explain how.

Let’s start with the legacy antivirus software.

Legacy anti-virus solutions are not able to keep up. Innovation is inadequate. The volume of attacks from:

  • DDoS Attacks
  • Malware Attacks
  • Ransomware Exploits
  • Viruses

Can not be charted. Hundreds of thousands of new strains appear daily. The best legacy anti-virus can’t keep up. It is overwhelmed. And here’s why.

The second culprit is the carelessness of employees.

But what makes them negligent? For starters device convenience. 50% of your data is accessible from a mobile phone. Not just a company-issued device. It could be a spouse or friend’s phone. A company, of any size, is a target. If your employee has 3 bars in the middle of the Sahara desert, your data can be accessed.

Secondly, your security and policies have gaps making it difficult to enforce your employees to follow proper protocols. According to the research, password policies lacked strict enforcement, 68% of the time. And 58% had no or unclear direction into password practices.

The third and final enabler.

I hate to be the one that says it, but the business owner or decision maker(s) prevent their protection from a Ransomware attack. They hang on to old beliefs. “It won’t happen to us.” Or “It costs too much to swap our legacy antivirus for endpoint solutions.”

45% in this group will pay the ransom, to get their files unlocked and returned, rather than the 55% that credit Cloud, Next Generation Endpoint protection. But those who spent to get their files back were targeted again and again and were attacked 73% of the time. The cyber-criminal sees that business as a bank atm. When they need some cash, it’s paid up or lose your files.

Of the 70% who swapped from Legacy Anti-Virus over to Next Generation Endpoint protection, 96% are confident they will prevent future attacks.