Promo Episode 14: Cyber Extortion - A Growing Business Threat

Speaker 0 00:01 Since 2015 cyber extortion has become one of the most significant exposures for most organizations, what it is and how to protect yourself this month on trade security. Speaker 1 00:13 Essentially what an extortion or a ransom demand is, is it's essentially a third party who enters into an organization system, texted with malware, so screen will pop up on your computer, which has instructions on how to pay the demand and has the actual demand that the hacker is asking for. One of the scarier things that organizations see, and this is when they start to panic, is a timer counting down until the hacker either wipes the systems or releases data. You cannot click off of the screen or do anything except pay or speak to the hacker, and typically that counter that is taking down the minutes every 30 minutes or every hour, the demand increases. So if you don't pay on time or in a timely manner, your payment is going to increase drastically because they may be asking for two or three Bitcoins. You may think that's cheap, but actually one Bitcoin can be anywhere from eight to $15,000 Canadian depending on how the crypto market is doing that day. Since it's constantly fluctuating. Speaker 0 01:20 Cassandra, long associate broker, cyber and privacy at Ayaan, we'll outline the cyber extortion threat for business this month on trade securely.