We have seen an alarming rise in cyber-attacks targeting U.S. businesses and government agencies, from the Colonial Pipeline to most recently, the world's largest meat supplier.

Thursday, the white house encouraged U.S. businesses to up their defenses against ransomware and consider the increasing cyber-attacks as major threats.

Dr. Christopher Mansour, a Mercyhurst University cyber security professor said large companies like the Colonial Pipeline and JBS meat often get targeted.

“They are an appealing point for hackers to target because these businesses are critical and they cannot stop working suddenly, so the owners tend to pay the ransom get that back up and running,” Mansour said.

Erie isn't immune to these cyber-attacks either, with one of our hospital systems, AHN, and municipal townships, Millcreek, falling victim to ransomware attacks last year.

Mansour said many of these attacks are coming from Russia, and these hackers are targeting critical businesses and ones with outdated systems. His advice is to never pay the ransom because you are just funneling money back to the hackers to get better tools to target more businesses in these attacks.

So what can be done to prevent these cyber and ransom attacks? Nick Powers, a Cyber Security Analyst expert with UNCOMN said even though it costs a little more, companies need to hire cyber security experts. However, the need far outweighs the number of people qualified to do this work.

“We’re still years away from filling that gap and so companies are struggling to find qualified individuals and trying to replace that with software and so we’re starting to see artificial intelligence and things like that being put in place,” Powers said.

He said doing that is not sufficient. There's a need just for cyber security experts for businesses large and small. Here in Erie, Mercyhurst University just sent graduating cyber security graduates into the field, and Mansour said utilizing them along with prevention is key to avoiding these hacks and attacks.

“Make sure to invest in cyber security properly ahead of time, hire the right people, invest in your humans and your employees,” he said. “They are your first line of defense.”

We are told businesses large and small fall into this a lot of times by clicking links that download ransomware right onto their computer.
So the advice is to be aware and to let experts help you out.