Ransomware Is More Real Than You Think

You have a teddy bear you want to love and protect. A big brother or sister takes the teddy bear and threatens to hold it for ransom until you pay up. What do you do? The teddy bear analogy is certainly simplistic, but it also reflects the reality of the ransomware attacks that organizations increasingly face. Attackers block access to critical data in exchange for increasingly outlandish ransoms. According to a Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 report, the highest ransom in 2020 was $30 million, up from $15 million in 2019. In this latest episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we spoke with Jason Williams, product marketing manager for Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks, about what organizations should do to protect themselves from ransomware attacks. Alex Williams, founder and publisher of TNS, hosted this episode.