Nearly every day there is another story about a ransomware attack in the news.

Just in the past few weeks, while the City of Atlanta was still tending to fresh wounds; the spin-machine at Boeing was in the spotlight desperately trying to downplay the impact of a cyberattack on its Dreamliner production plant.

With hashtags like WannaCry and SamSam trending almost every day; cybersecurity is top of mind – if not the single most concern today – for organizations large and small.

In February 2018 alone, a blogger who compiles and publishes a ‘cyberattack timeline’ for each month, reported attacks on targets ranging from advertisement screens in London, UK to Western Union to Tesla to Tim Hortons.

A study conducted in 2017 by Google, Chainalysis, The University of California at San Diego, and New York University estimated at the time that the most popular ransomware strains had netted a total of around $25 million in payments. And the attacks have only escalated since then.

But this number pales in comparison to the hours of lost productivity businesses suffer, and the resources spent trying to recover the data, as well as the time and effort needed to determine the extent of the breach to ensure that the damage has been contained.

If you follow recommendations from security vendors and experts in response to these attacks, you’ll notice that they all sound like a broken record: Patch regularly. Don’t use outdated systems. Update your antivirus. Tell users not to click on things. Run backups.

Brilliant, sound advice no doubt – but very much like someone telling us to ‘get more exercise’, or to ‘avoid sweets’ – platitudes at best, and not true solutions capable of addressing the real issues that leave organizations vulnerable in the face of cyber-threat.

There is no panacea to this phenomenon. Yet.

Religiously following ‘security best practices’ hasn’t prevented (or slowed down) the spread of threats like WannaCry and SamSam. And blaming unpatched systems and user negligence isn’t going to change anything anytime soon.

It is time to acknowledge these truths and to focus on new ideas that will.

AMTRA’s approach to focusing on awareness and preparedness in the face of this unprecedented and continuously shifting cyber-threat landscape; is designed to deliver on new ideas that weave together the threads of enhanced and unhindered end-user experience with modernizing and securing data, devices, and identities – delivered through an easy to manage platform leveraging the best of what trusted and proven solutions like Microsoft 365 and constructs like Predictive Analytics and Business Intelligence have to offer.

Perhaps it is time we had a conversation.

We’re here. And happy to help.