The breakdown also noted a couple of other variants of Big Head in existence, including one featuring a Microsoft Word icon that “was likely distributed as counterfeit software” and another that launched a more traditional ransomware demand screen after locking down the system in question. The fact that there are so many different versions of the virus suggests the cyber criminals behind it are still testing different strategies for deployment, which may also help explain why its spread has been thankfully contained thus far.
Empowered Employees the Best Line of Defense
Fortinet concludes its investigation by reminding those affected by ransomware that paying up is no guarantee of successfully recovering your data. As we note in our in recent ransomware statistics deep dive, as little as 4% of organizations that pay ransomware demands recover all their files safely.
This underlines the fact that best strategy for fighting ransomware and other types of cyber crime at businesses is employee-level prevention. Even the most secure operating system can be easily hacked these days, if someone on the victim’s side has unwittingly given away key credentials, so it’s more important than ever that staff are clued up on how to spot phishing attacks and other common initial points of compromise.
Almost as important as education is employees having the right tools at their disposal. To make online security easier for them, consider if one of the using a best password managers meets your organization’s needs. These are a remarkably effective way of ensuring that all the individual accounts linked to your company are protected by strong, unique passwords, as they take the pain out of remembering the kinds of increasingly complex combinations recently satirized by viral puzzler The Password Game.
