Even if you spend the majority of your time nurturing the growth of your business, you’ve probably noticed some disturbing headlines lately: “Forty Million Target Customers Affected By Data Breach,” “Cyber Attack Could Cost Sony Studio As Much As $100 Million,” “Hackers Penetrate West Wing Computer Network.”
Ten years ago, reports of computer hacking were rarely published in the mainstream media. Today it’s almost as common as the local weather. As a consumer, you’ve probably been worried about the safety of your personal data and what it might cost you if it got into the wrong hands. As a business owner, though, have you given it any serious thought? After all, what’s the real possibility that a hacker group would target the data stored on the servers of your individual company?
The reality is that your company is at risk from the same threats that businesses of all sizes face: viruses and malware. And today there’s a new trend in virus development that might just cost you more than slow computers and endless spam: it might ask you to fork over cold, hard cash. Welcome to the phenomenon known as ransomware.
Ransomware is a new category of malware defined by a simple but scary business model: a computer virus infects a workstation, restricts access to files or the system itself, and then demands that a ransom be paid to its creators (usually in the form of some hard-to-trace electronic payment). Some versions of ransomware simply lock the system and display a message, others are more sinister and actually encrypt the files on a hard drive with industrial strength, unbreakable cryptography. It’s digital blackmail, pure and simple.
Fortunately, there are things that you can do to protect yourself from ransomware and none of it is particularly new. It just requires you to be proactive.
Three Steps to Protect Your Company:
1. Train your team to surf safely. This granddaddy of computing advice still protects you against the new threat of ransomware. Today’s computer systems have come a long way in terms of securing themselves against attacks. What they can’t do is protect themselves from the actions of their users. Train your staff to not open unexpected email attachments — even if it’s for something as innocent looking as an unexpected job application. And definitely tell them not to click on any ads or popups while browsing the internet.
2. Setup a Super Firewall. You hopefully have an IT administrator or service provider that looks after your company’s computer systems (hint: if you don’t have one, you should really get one). Have them look into upgrading your standard firewall software with one that can filter out potentially dangerous websites or that can restrict which non-work-related websites your staff can access.
3. Make sure you have a solid backup strategy. One of the biggest headaches with today’s ransomware is that they encrypt your files to make it virtually impossible to recover them without paying the virus maker. Encryption keeps your phone messages safe from prying eyes, but it’s being used against you by these viruses. The only way to avoid paying the ransom is to completely restore your system from a clean, recent backup. Your IT administrator or service provider should have an automated backup procedure in place that’s transparent to your staff and comprehensive in the number of backups kept over a lengthy period of time.
Even though ransomware is a scary new tactic in the war between hackers and businesses, there are tools available to minimize your risk. At Dynamic Edge, we run into issues like this all the time, and have a solution: fitSync. This collaborative tool can recover from ransomware in minutes rather than days, saving you and your business a great deal of time and money in the event of a ransomware infection. For more information about fitSync and how it can help your business, give us a call.
