Steve Tcherchian of CISO+XYPRO On The 5 Things You Need To Do To Protect Yourself Or Your Business From A Ransomware Attack
Ransomware attacks have sadly become commonplace and increasingly more brazen. Huge enterprise businesses, gas pipelines, universities, and even cities have been crippled by ransomware and forced to pay huge ransoms. What can an individual or a business do to prevent and repel a ransomware attack?
In this interview series, we are talking to cybersecurity experts who can share insights from their experience and expertise about the “5 Things You Need To Do To Protect Yourself Or Your Business From A Ransomware Attack.” As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Steve Tcherchian.
Steve is Chief Information Security Officer at XYPRO, a leading cybersecurity analytics company. He is on the ISSA CISO Advisory Board, the NonStop Under 40 executive board and is part of the ANSI X9 Security Standards Committee. Steve is a regular contributor to and presenter at the EC-Council. With almost 20 years in the cybersecurity field, Steve is responsible for strategy, innovation and development of XYPRO’s security product line as well as overseeing XYPRO’s risk, compliance and security to ensure the best experience to customers in the Mission Critical computing marketplace.
Backups — The best way to combat ransomware is ensure security best practices are implemented and you have working/verified backups.
Steve Tcherchian
Chief Information Security Officer
XYPRO Technology
With the acceleration of hardware-based vulnerabilities, we’ve started to see more firmware targeted ransomware. This is particularly destructive because with crypto ransomware, as long as you have current, working backups, you can wipe the computer, reinstall the operating system, restore your data and your system is back to normal in no time. With firmware-based ransomware, you can reinstall the operating system and recover the data all you want. The ransomware is hidden with a hardware components firmware and just keeps coming back. This essentially renders your entire computer useless.
