A cold reality in today’s enterprise is that ransomware is looming and threatening organizations constantly – like a lion behind the tall grass waiting patiently for its prey. It has unequivocally become the biggest threat to an enterprise alongside malware and phishing, even more so than a natural disaster or hardware failure, or a zero-day attack.

Take a look back at 2020 in ransomware. What were the key targets and what can security leaders learn from them?

Here are practical tools small- to medium-sized businesses can implement to improve and respond to cybersecurity.

The answer is yes, but the how may be different than you think.

As Jewish families around the world prepared for the High Holidays last month, the most significant days of the Jewish calendar, synagogues prepared to facilitate services under unprecedented circumstances due to the coronavirus pandemic. For those of us that work on providing security for the Jewish community, it would become yet another time of heightened vigilance.

Criminals are leveraging elevated interest in COVID-19 to send emails to unsuspecting people to infect computers with ransomware, malware or other computer viruses. And why not? According to Forbes, the COVID-19 crisis has turned the U.S. workforce into a work-from-home army, giving cybercriminals new, less secure, access points for cyber viruses and phishing attacks, revealing vulnerabilities in cybersecurity strategies for the coronavirus crisis. And since there’s a tremendous curiosity for coronavirus information — people are more likely to click without checking the credibility of the source.

UK Police just announced that crime has fallen by 28% over lockdown, in fact from 12th April there has been a 37% drop in burglaries. As well as the financial worries lockdown prompted, we were also worried about our office and storage spaces, as we didn’t know how long they would be left unattended. Of course, working in security and safety we made sure specific measures were in place to help prevent vandalism, theft, arson or property damage. However, it appears that many businesses are left susceptible to such crimes, by not having many or sometimes any security measures in place.

To get buy in from the entire organization on your role as a security professional, share these basic elements of an effective cybersecurity strategy with the rest of the C-suite.