Technology

The Risks Involved in Paying After Ransomware Attacks

Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay Ransomware attacks do not necessarily end with the payment despite the huge sum of money involved, there are potential risks attached to the attacks.  A session at Gartner’s Security & Risk Management Summit has revealed that the average cost of a ransomware payment in Q1 2020 was $178,254. While the amount is on the high side, you should know that the downtime cost due to any attack was not taken into consideration. Depending on the size of your business and especially if it’s a midsize company, there are chances that you’ll not be getting all of your encrypted data back after you might have paid for the ransomware attack, the session went on to divulge. Paul Furtado, a senior director and analyst of MSE security at Gartner, was reported to have observed that “What we see is that about 4% of the data is non-recoverable.” What this boils down to is that you have lost both ways.  You have paid the ransom demanded but your data has been compromised and tampered with. It dawns on you that the guys you are dealing with don’t have an iota of good intention for you and your business.  Another thing…

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Business

Four Easy Ways to Reduce The Risk of Your Investment Portfolio

Image by Nattanan Kanchanaprat from Pixabay The dimension with which we measure the risk of an investment asset and, by extension, of an investment portfolio (which is the set of financial assets in which you invest) is volatility. As we have seen on other occasions, volatility cannot collect all the risk, but a significant part, and it is also the standard measure that allows us to know how risky an asset is compared to the market average or other assets. A well-diversified investment in stocks usually has around 20% volatility and fixed income (mainly sovereign fixed income) around 5%. From there we can compare. Those of us who started investing before the last great crisis have the psychological anchor of this one, and the great drops (drawdowns) and their prolongation in time are always very present in our minds. It is what destroys personal psychology from a financial point of view and what makes you quit. The great crises mark generations and establish guidelines of good sense and caution that are absolutely necessary for the operation of a personal investment system that lasts a lifetime. This has the problem that we bias ourselves towards the risks that may occur and build investment portfolios…

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