News Insights: Ransomware hits Louisiana state government systems | ZDNet

News Insights:

James McQuiggan, Security Awareness Advocate, Knowbe4:

“This is an excellent example of having a robust and dedicated team of security experts to deal with incidents when they hit your organization.  Being able to recover quickly and return to normal operations is important for the employees and the customers, as it provides them with a strong sense of confidence that the organization takes security seriously.

Ransomware is going to be a strong and profitable attack vector for criminals until organizations can repeatedly reduce the impact of an attack with strong business continuity and incident response programs that include less downtime and no payout.”

Richard Henderson, Head of Global Threat Intelligence at Lastline:

“When attacks like this take place, it really serves as a big reminder of how truly connected virtually every single thing we do is today. A large number of government services are not available, and some may take a lot of time to come back online. Other services are down for now because the state took other systems offline to staunch the bleeding and prevent greater harm. The days of doing everything on paper in triplicate are long gone – it’s likely many government agencies neither have the ability or the trained staff to go back to servicing citizens like they did 15 or 20 years ago.

The good news is that based on initial tweets from the state and early reporting, it’s clear that the state was at the very least thinking about an attack such as this. They were quick to respond and quick to stop the spread. Couple that with their relatively open sharing of information, the state has done a pretty good job so far in dealing with this. The lesson here is clear: having a disaster plan in place, that you have practiced ahead of an incident is absolutely critical if and when it happens to you. Do you know all the right people to call? All the right switches to flip on or off? How to enact your disaster preparedness plans? Who will speak for you? Having answers to all of these questions and practicing your response goes a long way to being ready for it.”