How to keep your business safe from Ransomware Attacks? 30 Aug 2017 | By Jish Topics: Keeping business safe from Ransomware Attacks

Ransomware attacks are more common these days. Although, these attacks are done targeted at large firms, small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) are more vulnerable and are coming under direct attack. If you’re considering the threat levels, be sure about one thing, you’re vulnerable!

The cyber experts says that SMEs are caught in the crossfire from other attacks against larger firms. This happens because they're often less well protected than big companies. For hackers, the small and medium businesses may be often seen as a route into larger partners’ networks. If attackers identifies larger companies in the supply chain of small-medium businesses, they will target them quite specifically.

What is Ransomware?

Ransomware is a style of attack that encrypts your business data or make it inaccessible until a payment is made to “unlock” it. You’ll have to pay the demand, often via bitcoin, and the data is decrypted, but not every time.

How does ransomware spread?

Ransomware spreads via the same methods as other malware: breaking into systems via known, but unpatched, vulnerabilities; sneaking in through zero-day flaws; or installed accidentally by unwitting users via malicious emails.

What is the motive behind the people who are involved in these attacks?

A hacker or a group of attackers can be anyone from a bored kid, a financially-motivated individual, and the state-sponsored attackers. While they are outsiders, there are insider threats for businesses from anywhere such as political activists or hacktivists – or any combination of those. You can as well have financially motivated insiders who can spy your company for £50,000, for example.

You need to assess between these threats to ask yourself, who you might have annoyed in the past.

What are the precautions or methods to keep ransomware at bay?

software up-to-date and patched. These are the basic precautions to defeat a lot of ransomware. Avoiding ransomware requires businesses to keepand patched. These are the basic precautions to defeat a lot of ransomware.

If you have the back-up, you could restore the uninfected versions by deleting all the encrypted files. But, before you do that make sure the back-ups work and can be restored.

Backups are only one part of a disaster-recovery plan, so take the time to plan and practice how your firm will react to a data loss.

Your system backups should also be tested for disaster recovery system. Without testing, you have to wait until an attack to find out how it works, by which point it’s too late.

If you can afford, call in a professional to resolve the issue.

Should you pay the ransom demand, if infected?

If your company is infected by ransomware and its backups fail, you should not pay the ransom demand. Because, there is no guarantee that you’ll get back your data if you do pay up. But, if you’re sure that spending a few bitcoin may be the best road to get your data back faster, do it.

Extra add-ons to keep your business secured

Educate yourself at first to keep your data and system secure.

Don’t leave a lot of files on the desktop

Add intrusion detection systems

Always choose strong passwords

Patch-up your machines regularly

Run a security team who are trained enough to keep all things on top.

You can’t stop people from doing malicious attacks, but you can keep your networks and machines protected. So, do it!