Protection against data leakage

Once again, a cyberattack on a public authority is making headlines: - the stolen data even ended up on the Darknet. The attackers had encrypted the city's servers with ransomware. The cyber criminals did not demand a ransom, but threatened to publish the data on the Darknet. In fact, - but it is not personal data. According to the current state of the investigation, this is not a targeted cyberattack on the town of Schriesheim. According to the state data protection officer, it will be several weeks before the authority is fully functional again. The attack presumably took place as early as April.

Attacks like these are happening more and more frequently: Hackers not only encrypt data, but also pull it off the attack victims' servers. Then they threaten to publish sensitive data online. Most recently, the hacker group Hive made headlines with this approach and an attack on the Ceconomy network (Media Markt/Saturn).

The strategy of a data backup no longer works with this new form of ransomware attacks. This makes these attacks even more dangerous than traditional ransomware and underlines how important it is for authorities and organizations to secure IT systems accordingly.

How to protect against data leakage?

R&S®Browser in the Box offers effective and proactive protection against the new ransomware variant. It protects both against an attacker gaining access to the corporate or government network and against data being siphoned off to the outside. The decisive factor here is the multi-level security concept that conventional "secure browsers" do not have:

• The browser itself is locked away from the rest of the system in a virtual environment. Only explicitly wanted downloads are possible (no drive-by downloads). Malware is kept away from the rest of the user's PC.
• All web pages are opened in isolation from the host system. This makes it impossible to attack the host system directly from the browser.
• The internal corporate network (intranet) and the Internet are completely separate from each other. Malware can therefore not report back to the command & control server to receive the initial commands for an attack. Malware also cannot upload data to a malware vendor's leak server. This makes data theft impossible.

For more information on the R&S® Browser in the Box, click here: