If you are a particularly optimistic person who tries to find positivity in negative events, you may tend to think about data violations as not particularly bad. Certainly ransom attacks and other piracy accidents may cause companies to lose, suffer from reputation damage, and even pay fines or penalties. But at least companies continue, right?
The answer, unfortunately, is “not always”. Although many of the most famous infiltrators that have occurred in recent years have not forced their goals to get out of work, some attacks have become existential threats that force companies to close. Institutions lose a lot of data that are important for their processes, or face such sharp financial repercussions, which have no choice but completely closing.
To prove this point, here is a look at five main breakthroughs in this contract that ended in the scenarios of the worst cases from the work perspective. Since we confirm, these are also lessons in why effective data protection capabilities are very important, not only as a way to reduce disorders, but also to protect the validity of your own business.
1. Travelex Ransomware Attack (2020)
In early 2020-with the spread of Covid-19 and most of the world still enjoys the last weeks of “before the time”-Travelex has witnessed foreign currency exchange an attack on ransom programs that closed its operations in 30 countries. The attackers demanded 6 million dollars (some sources reported 3 million dollars) in a ransom to recover the company’s data.
The company seems to negotiate with the attackers, who agreed to settle $ 2.3 million. But like 92 percent of companies that pay a ransom without recovering their entire data, Travelex could not return to normal after settling with infiltrators. Instead, it ended with restructuring, and effectively out of work.
It should also be noted that travelex was apparently online insurance policy before the attack. But this was not enough to cover the dangerous losses that incurred it from interruption in its operations.
In the repercussions of the accident, Trainlex executive officials said that the company may have managed to overcome the attack if not for the beginning of the Covid-19, which led (by causing a great slowdown in global travel, and thus needed to exchange foreign currencies), which led to significant losses in revenue independent of those stemming from RansomWare accidents. This seems reasonable.
The same reasoning is that if Travelex copies his data and had an effective plan to restore disasters before the attack, it is likely that it would have prepared their systems without paying the ransom. Perhaps the company was in a better position to survive than the Kofid crisis that followed.
2. Medisecure (2024)
In July 2024, Medisecure, which provides electronic recipes in Australia, announced that it had suffered a breach of 12.9 million records – nearly half of the country’s population.
According to limited information available to the public on how to violate, threatening representatives seemed to have taken advantage of a security vulnerability to grow ransom programs in the information technology property in Medisure. After that, they encrypt the patient’s sensitive data and demanded a ransom to release it.
It is not clear whether medisure has already pushed the ransom, but it may not be much because the attackers used stolen data to launch other attacks against individuals who have been subjected to their personal information.
In the aftermath of the incident, Medisure requested a financial rescue from the Australian government, and is supposed to protect itself from the capabilities of lawsuits from the affected parties seeking to bear the company responsible for exposing their personal information. The government rejected the demand, and shortly after, the largest in a country called “administration” – which really means that it is reorganized, and may stop operations once the response to the repercussions of the breach ends.
Ready -made meals: encrypting sensitive data – including sensitive information stored in backup, which must be unchangeable to ensure that the attackers are unable to tamper with them. Although it is not quite clear whether the encrypted backup will prevent colonial breach, they will definitely not hurt. At least, they would help ensure that if the attackers targeted backup copies as a way to access sensitive information, they would not be able to do this without a decoding key.
3. Discord.io Hack (2023)
An example of an accident where a commercial company closed even without detention of its data for a ransom, Discord.io announced in August 2023 that it was stopping the operations. The advertisement follows a major event for piracy in which the representatives of the threat got access to the company’s main customer database and offered it for sale.
It is unclear whether the database, which contains personal information about about 760,000 Discord.io members, is already sold. However, the company (which submitted invitations for the background correspondence platform, which works independently of the same dispute) apparently chose to close – probably in an attempt to avoid lawsuits related to the incorrect management claims for sensitive data. In other words, it appears that Discord.io has seen writing on the wall and calculated that instead of waiting for the bankruptcy, it may go ahead with work immediately.
Since this penetration stems from a compromise of the production database instead of backup copies, it is not clear that the strongest investment in the backup and recovery versions would have saved the company. However, the protection of data and weather (or avoiding) such as these major breakthroughs tend to move forward: if you take steps to properly support data, you are likely to enjoy a stronger comprehensive security position and a higher level of business elasticity as well.
4. National General Data (2024)
In August 2024, the national public data, which collects and processing information for background tests, announced that 2.9 billion records containing personal information linked to up to 170 million people. The attack appears to have occurred because infiltrators have set a compressed file on the company’s website that allows them to access its databases. After several months, the company applied for bankruptcy and closing it due to the financial impact of breach.
As with some other modern data breach incidents, it is not clear that backups alone would have provided national public data from the closure. But they were an essential step in a broader electronic hygiene strategy that may have prevented serious practices such as storing access to access data in the postal code archive.
5. Code distances (2014)
Spaces Code is a story that we have previously talked about. Although this has happened more than a decade ago, it is worth reciting because it is still devastating today, given the consequences of this breach. The team woke up in the service of hosting the source software instructions one morning and discovered that the infiltrators infiltrated the Amazon web control panel. Then they demanded a huge ransom in exchange for the return of control over their own systems. This turned into a terrifying period for 12 hours, where they saw their entire digital presence begin to disappear. The code spaces discovered that the infiltrators carried out the DDOS attack and began to infiltrate their Amazon EC2 control panel. The infiltrators have destroyed not only their initial data, but even their backup systems-including backups across the area that aims to be their safety network.
When N2W’s customers heard about this story, many continued because they finally understood that their data and wraps should be stored in AWS account is completely separate. If the code spaces have done so, backup data will be safe and will remove the anxiety that the account that was hacked will delete a snapshot and delete the data.
When dust finally settled, the damage was catastrophic and the company could not maintain itself. The company has never recovered, becoming a flagrant reminder that the loss of backup data may mean losing everything.
Protect your data – and your work
Certainly violations that lead to total dissolution or the restructuring of companies are relatively rare. Most companies have been able to survive on electronic attacks, even if they lost the data permanently.
But the above examples prove that closing operations as a result of violations can occur and happen – a reminder of the reason that protecting effective data is very important not only to avoid fines or bad addresses about your work, but to ensure their ability to maintain operations in the wake of breakthroughs.
To avoid leaving your company a victim of existential data breach, invest in advanced data protection practices such as:
- Reserve for methodological dataRegular data reserves based on a table that reflects the RPO and RTO needs for your company. This guarantees that you have backups on hand on hand, which were modern enough to restore your operations without losing important information.
- Non -changing backup copiesCreating fixed backup copies helps to ensure the attackers can access the backup data in addition to your production systems, they will not be able to delete or tamper with backups – so you will remain able to perform a successful recovery process.
- Reserve version across the region: The backup version across the region adds another layer of warranty to protect the work burdens and data based on the groom by allowing you to quickly restore operations using a different cloud area if your basic area is affected by interruption or attack.
- Reserve copy: The account backup via the account, also promotes data protection by making it possible to restore data through accounts so that if one account is penetrated, you can quickly restore the operations using a different account.
- The network is cloning: To quickly restore operations after an accident, only recovering your data is not enough. You also need to be able to restore network settings – so you must clone the network formations at the same time that you copy the work burden.
- Disaster recovery planning: Plan forward of how to respond when it is a Ransomwari incident or other threatening strikes. The more you plan for all possible attack and recovery scenarios, the more you can restore commercial operations quickly and including enough to avoid adhering to your organization’s ability.
- Recovery from cross disasters: For those organizations that carried out a multi -black solution, it is necessary to take advantage of the air gap across the cloud. The future of Multicloud means not to rely on one seller while at one time it is costly effective.
The difficult thing in ransom attacks and other data violations is that it is impossible to predict how or when it may happen – which means that it cannot ensure that there is no degree of security hardening that you will not be attacked.
However, what you can do, and what you may have been supposed to do by many companies described above – protect data resources. By restricting access to databases and other production data assets, while generating safe and non -changeable backup copies, you can put your organization in the strongest possible position to see itself through the data breach incident without getting out of the work.
Backup penetration with N2W
No one is immune to what is unexpected-this is why N2W baked ransom flexibility in each layer of our platform. To get the maximum of ransomwanns, N2W customers are sure:
He wrote: Chris Tuzi
