Ransomware recovery timeframes can vary widely. In very unusual situations, companies are only down for a day or two. In other unusual cases, it can take months. Most companies fall somewhere between the two to four week range, given their [...]
Paying a ransom is no joke. Being victimized by ransomware can leave you breathless and concerned for the future of your business, and anyone who would inflict this type of harm cannot be trusted. You are dealing with criminals, although [...]
In the wake of the recent and widespread SolarWinds attack that compromised U.S. government agencies, as well as the increase in cyber activity across all industries and organizations, CompTIA has established an Cybersecurity Advisory Council that aims to provide cybersecurity [...]
And if your firm buys cyber breach insurance, will the insurance pay? There are many stipulations in regards to qualifying for cyber breach insurance. Most insurance companies require you to affirm a Statement of Fact and Fraud Warning. When [...]
Since each ransom attack varies so much, it is tough to answer what exactly the typical ransomware payment is. It is also difficult to pinpoint the exact number of ransomware gangs that are active, but it is certainly a large amount.
In August of 2018, I shared an opinion about the value of cyber breach insurance. I was not very fond of it, at least not at the time given the typical insurance company terms vs. the typical cost of the risk at the time. Here is that opinion – Should I buy cyber insurance?
Last month, Alvaka COO and CISO, Kevin McDonald, sat down with the Miles Jobgen of the CompTIA Biz Tech Podcast to share his experiences with rescuing and restoring clients from ransomware—the most dangerous threat to IT solution providers today. He [...]
The following is a guest blog written by Ciaran Foley of XeneX. Ciaran discusses the current and future state of cybersecurity, including the big business of enterprise-scale ransomware operations. As a Corporate Executive or Board Member, you may never [...]
Alvaka Networks President and CEO, Oli Thordarson, recently answered some questions posed by John Edwards for a story he is writing for TechTarget. Oli’s personal thoughts and experiences are based on over 35 years working in the IT profession—and alongside [...]
In the cat-and-mouse world of ransomware and cybersecurity, with businesses and governments needing to place two steps between them and cybercriminals, comes a new obstacle – Ransomware-as-a-Service. Dharma, a cybercriminal firm, provides, “one of the most popular offerings around, saying [...]
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. The process typically involves making sure servers are rebooted in the right order, making sure they have completely rebooted, restarting applications in the right order, and then testing to be certain everything is working properly when users return to work in the morning.
This typically takes 30 minutes per server, depending upon your environment.
PCs are not typically smoke tested, or if so, not all of them.
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
There are many variables to consider. Some are:
You want to enter in a fully burdened labor rate for this field. What that means is that you want to take the base hourly rate, plus 25-30% for employer payroll taxes, benefits, vacation/holiday time, etc.
For example, someone making $80,000 per year will typically work 52 weeks of 40 hours, or 2080 hours. $80,000 divided by 2080 is $38.46/hour. Multiply that hourly rate by 1.3, and you get $50.00/hour. Of course, rates of pay, taxes and benefits will vary from city, state and company; but 30% is usually a good number to use. Don’t forget to account for time-and-a-half or after-hours rates of pay if patching is being done in the late evening, early morning, or weekends (in order to avoid impacting user productivity).
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.
If you are presenting to management for a budget, and using this calculator as the basis for a Return on Investment (ROI), you will need to do more homework. An ROI measures as a ratio of the cost of investment against its expected benefit. For patching, calculating benefit can be very difficult to determine. How do you measure the cost of a system breach you have not yet had? You can estimate what expenses, penalties, and losses a company might incur when a breach occurs; but there is no certainty of a breach event and what those costs actually are. There are also regulatory compliance issues and/or potential fines for not patching, but those, too, can be vague. For calculating these potential risks and costs, it is advisable to enter into a discussion with your management team.