Business ransomware attacks are on the rise and they are devastating. An attack prevents employees from accessing your systems and payment of a ransom is demanded to regain access. All your business data—accounting, customer contacts, project plans, sales—are held hostage, encrypted. Payment is often demanded via cryptocurrency or credit card, but there is no guarantee you will get your files back. Most commonly, this malware arrives through spam, or unsolicited email, employing tricks to entice users to open booby-trapped attachments in Word or PDF files. More sophisticated methods involve employees browsing the web, even legitimate sites, unaware their computer's location and information is being monitored. Based on that user's identified system vulnerabilities, criminals will then target a business system for a ransomware attack.
To limit the possibility of a ransomware attack, make sure all the software on your network is always up-to-date, including your virus and threat protection software. Educate employees on malware and ensure they are using strong passwords. Tighten security by deleting system admin passwords no longer in use. Finally, backup your data regularly. The best protection against ransomware down time is backups.
Bright Software helped one customer quickly move to the cloud after a ransomware attack. They did not have backups of their latest data, but we were able to help them restore what they had. Justifying the cost of moving to the cloud was easy for a number of factors, but especially because the cloud service provides off-site full-scale backup functionality on secure servers with high-level encryption and multi-factor authentication. If their business should fall victim again, even with multiple new safeguards in place, remediating a ransomware attack from proper backups means far less to little down time.
If you are considering a move to the cloud or trying to recover data from a viral attack, give us a call, as it's likely we've seen it before.