The State of Ransomware in the US

 

As regular readers know, security is one of the many aspects of tech that fascinate me.  I'm by NO means in expert in this.  As the Technology Evangelist, I've always felt my role has been to make others aware of what is out there and what is on the horizon.  I figure that way you can better prepare yourself for change and, really more importantly, not be caught flat footed by sweeping change.  I think the hardest part about change is not doing it gradually.

With my background in dentistry, I've always said "Life is like orthodontics" and what I mean by this is pretty simple.  Change accomplished gradually is usually pretty easy.  Slow and steady change yields easy and predictable results.   If you move teeth over 18-24 months, you can get amazing results.  However, if you try and move teeth over a weekend, it won't work plus, it's going to be painful.  So I like to keep on a constant moving sidewalk of improvement.

The other thing I've always felt is that you can't be an expert at everything.  We all have our niches that we have a knack for.  If you combine your abilities with great education and training, you get exponentially better.  That's served me pretty well over the years.  I've always gone by the philosophy of not stepping out of my core competency.  My thought process has always been to find good people that are really good at what they do, and then get out of their way and let them do it.  Micromanaging great employees only leads to frustration and micromanaging your vendors unnecessarily leads to the same.

So when it came to security, I made myself as knowledgeable as I could be, but I never handled it myself.  I wanted to make sure I knew the space, but the more I learned, the more I realized how little I knew.  I got to the point where I knew what I didn't know and I also realized that it was something I'd never be able to handle on my own.

When I owned by office, I tried to surround myself with the best employees and vendors I could find.  One of those vendors was Emsisoft.  I got lucky with this one.  I had met and became good friends with a guy that I really respected for his knowledge of security.  He happened to change jobs and began a career with Emsisoft.  As we talked about the company and he gained experience there, I did some research on them and the combination of my research and my confidence in my friend combined to give me the confidence in letting them handle our antivirus needs as well as providing some of my security services.

Over the years, I continued to be impressed with them and over the years they became *really* involved with helping in the Ransomware space.  I quickly learned that when Emsisoft talked about Ransomware, it paid to listen to them.  If you are looking for a good company to protect yourself, I highly recommend using them.

They recently released a report titled "The State of Ransomware in the U.S.:  Report and Statistics 2024".  I've given it a thorough read and I think you should too.  Here is a link to the report.  It makes for fascinating reading!