Cyber ​​extortion is on the rise, as evidenced by recent, high-profile cases. Lured by easy and lucrative financial gains, cybercriminals have become more persistent and sophisticated. Attacks are now executing triple doses of extortion, with data encryption, public exposure of stolen data and distributed denial of service blitzes.

To address these threats, availability and redundancy must be central architectural principles, and this must permeate all services in applications, according to Roland Dobbins (pictured, right), principal engineer at Netscout Systems Inc.

“There has to be a defense plan in order to defend these assets in these organizations against attack, whether it’s a DDoS attack or whether it’s a containment plan to deal with ransomware that potentially gets loose inside the enterprise network,” he said. “There has to be a plan to contain it, and deal with it, and restore from backup.”

Dobbins and Richard Hummel (pictured, left), manager of threat research at Arbor Networks, the security division of Netscout Systems, spoke with John Walls, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation. They discussed the evolution of cyberattacks, the tiresome effects of triple extortion on companies, and what enterprises must do to avoid the financial and operational impacts of these threats. (* Disclosure below.)

Defense plans need constant updates

As technology evolves rapidly and companies’ operations also change over time, cyberthreat defense plans need to be constantly updated, according to Dobbins. Another essential point is that businesses must have skilled people with deep and broad knowledge on the subject.

“Either you bring those people into your organization or you reach out and get that expertise from organizations who do in fact have that kind of expertise on tap and available,” he said.

The need to be prepared is due to the fact that being hit by a cyberattack is no longer a matter of “if” but “when,” according to Hummel. As nearly every company in the world now depends on internet connectivity to comprehensively run their business, they are all at risk.

“If you don’t have the expertise, you’re not going to be able to respond properly; if you have individuals that aren’t concerned about security, now you’re going to have a bunch of gaps,” Hummel explained. “And having security awareness pushed out as much as possible to every single person we can, that’s really the key — this preparation, this awareness of what adversaries are doing in order to defend against them.”

The good news for the enterprise is that organizations that prepare themselves from an architectural and operational perspective to deal with one type of attack are also prepared to face others. Much of the planning, resources and organizational changes that need to be made are actually very similar, according to Dobbins.

“If organizations have been doing a good job and ensuring that their systems are secured, and if they do get hit somehow with ransomware that they have the ability to maintain operations and communications and recover, they’re about 80% of where they need to be to be able to successfully withstand DDoS attacks,” Dobbins concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage. (* Disclosure: This segment was sponsored by Netscout Systems Inc. Neither Netscout nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE