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Earlier this week, GroupSense's CEO, Kurtis Minder, participated in *AIMA's APAC Webinar: Cyber Security x Ransomware: Squid Games Edition.

*Note: An account is needed to view the replay.

Kurtis Minder, GroupSense CEO and cofounder, sat down with Joe Meadows, Partner at Gordon & Rees, and talked about seven tips for negotiating with hackers (or anyone for that matter!). Here are a few highlights of that conversation:

In 2021, we saw a steady rise in the number of ransomware attacks. It’s projected that global ransomware damage costs will reach $20 billion by the end of 2021. Nearly every week, you hear of a new high-profile catastrophic breach, but organizations of all sizes have been critically impacted by ransomware and cyber threats.

GroupSense performed a deep and dark web investigation into the critical remote code execution (RCE) zero-day impacting the Apache Java-based logging utility Log4j (CVE-2021-44228). This high severity vulnerability is already being actively exploited in the wild, per numerous public reports. The attack vector is extremely trivial for threat actors to exploit, requiring only a single string of code, and impacts software products from numerous vendors. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is maintaining an updated list of affected vendors.

Ransomware needs its own kill chain framework

GroupSense's Intelligence Analyst, Nicole Hoffman, is featured in SC Media. Nicole explains the evolution of the Cyber Kill Chain developed by Lockheed Martin and argues that the industry needs a kill chain specifically for ransomware.

By Kurtis Minder, CEO, GroupSense

Kurtis Minder, CEO of the American cyber security company GroupSense, has been busy acting as a ransom negotiator in ransomware cases. It started with a client who needed help, and then as the number of cases increased, he refined his ability to negotiate with the criminal gangs on the other side.

“What bothers me most is how preventable this all is.”

Kurtis Minder, CEO of GroupSense, provided commentary to The Baltimore Sun yesterday about “vaccinating” a company against ransomware. “What bothers me most is how preventable this all is. In fact, like current COVID-19 deaths, it’s at least 99.2% preventable. “Vaccinating” a company against ransomware isn’t expensive or technically daunting — yet companies fail at simple cyber hygiene and put their businesses, our critical infrastructure, and sometimes even people’s lives, at risk,” says Kurtis Minder.

Below are a few highlights from Kurtis’ op-ed.

Question: How can I reduce the chances of my company getting hit by ransomware? Where do I start?

Ransomware attacks have increased significantly over the past year. There were 93% more ransomware attacks carried out in the first half of 2021 than the same period last year.