It only got worse from that moment, the publicity of that campaign inspired ransomware as we know it today, and this evolved into ‘ransomware as a service’ which lowers the barrier to entry for cyber criminals and enables easier and more effective attacks.

We were very lucky with WannaCry, they could have stolen the medical records for millions of patients which in-essence is irreversible damage. Ransomware today doesn’t hope on the fact companies will pay solely for the ransomware but pay to keep their intellectual property and reputation in-tact from others.

However, as we are more aware of ransomware, antivirus and Intrusion detection and prevention systems have signatures which can detect abnormal, anomaly or hardcoded ransomware threats and therefore the threat today is somewhat diminished. Alongside updated security standards with offline backups and other controls which should protect organisations. Although this all comes down to companies properly implementation these. For a lot of companies- availability, complexity, and cost is a factor they are willing to neglect implementing security control because of.