I have a plan for small to medium sized companies to mitigate the risks and survive a ransomware attack.

In my last blog post I covered some news out of Trend Micro about malware exfiling browser login data. Trend Micro stops short of showing how to decrypt the passwords so I went looking for some code that did the deed but came up short. But I wanted it. I wanted it a lot.

Trend Micro has an article published in December that is super exciting reading if you're the sort of person who gets excited about revealing all of a user's plaintext Internet passwords during an engagement. I am just that sort of person.

You'll find a lot of companies willing to test your external attack surfaces: your website, app servers, VPN appliances, etc (we'd happily do that too). But that is only a portion of your organization's exposure. Your internal network is attackable.

The Internet has become an increasingly integral part of our everyday lives. Consumers access websites from an array of mobile devices at all hours. When a consumer goes to a website, they expect that site to be up and performing properly.

2020 is upon us and if there is one thing humanity has learned throughout its history, it is that if one hopes to succeed in the future they must learn from the mistakes of the past. Lessons learned from episodes of website downtime are no exception to this rule.

Here at Alertra, we often tell our readers to communicate with the pubic whenever their websites experience downtime. We also suggest utilizing social media platforms, such as Twitter, to keep the public updated and informed. What happens, however, when Twitter becomes unreliable?

One might be lulled into a false sense of safety in terms of website downtime when we consider the advances that have been made in technology. The fact of the matter is, however, that protecting your website from downtime is important more now than ever. Yes, technology has indeed advanced and there are now more tools than ever at your disposal that can help mitigate website downtime. The question you must ask is, are you actually utilizing all the tools available to you and do you have a downtime plan in place for your website?

Last month we speculated that, perhaps, Amazon would have learned from the millions the company lost during the website downtime Amazon experienced during 2018’s Amazon Prime Day event. While we were hopeful that Amazon would be ready for 2019’s Prime Day, the fact of the matter is that while we didn’t see massive website downtime and outages that were equal to that of the issues we saw in 2018, some serious problems were still very apparent.

We have, more than once in recent years, questioned whether the etail giant Amazon would properly prepare for their annual Prime Day in terms of accommodating a massive influx of traffic while maintaining website uptime and performance. Prime Day is now right around the corner and the deal hunters who flock to Amazon to take advantage of the deep discounts are wondering if, this year, the site will finally operate without downtime interruptions and serious performance problems.