Malicious software, viruses and malware have been a plague on IT as long as data has been important. Ransomware is a breed of malware that goes beyond a nuisance and becomes truly terrifying to an organization.
Ransomware typically will do something to prevent users from accessing their data unless they pay to get the key. Crypto ransomware is especially dangerous as it will not only lock someone out of their data, but encrypt it. With this tactic, traditional data recovery methods and workarounds are ineffective.
More sophisticated ransomwares can even find network drives and remote servers and start to encrypt them, causing a chain reaction that happens faster than most IT teams can react. To top this off, newer versions of ransomware will actually remove shadow copies and backup files, which can put companies in quite the predicament: Pay the ransom or lose the data.
The impact of ransomware on an organization stretches far beyond the cost of just unlocking the files. Once systems are encrypted they are no longer accessible and can cause major outages of vital infrastructure systems.
The time it takes to recognize the attack and remediate it all constitutes unplanned loss of revenue and productivity, and in the worst case, there could be permanent loss of critical data. If data is lost, what does that do to the image of the company or potential future relationships? The cost of intangible losses like these cannot be measured by just the price of unlocking the files.