During this year 2020 Ransomware has been the most hurtful type of cyber-attack, according to Infosecurity Magazine ransomware attacks had raised almost 500% during this pandemic. Being careful is not enough.
Nowadays everyone needs to be protected against cyber attacks. Cyber Attacks moved from punctual occurrences to targeted users or companies towards largely automated campaigns that have nothing to envy to large marketing campaigns. Therefore nobody is safe by default.
One of the most asked questions when it comes to cybersecurity is should we pay the ransom? Well, the truth is that even if you are determined not to pay most companies end up paying the ransom due the high value of the information that they will loose if they don’t pay, as said in IT Pro.
Therefore how can we protect from ransomware?
There are two major steps or key elements in the protection against the ransomware:
Get a great antivirus; not like other kinds of attacks most ransomware does not exploit zero-day vulnerabilities, that means that they use an attack vector that can be recognized by an antivirus. Get a great antivirus and keep your systems up to date. This simple step can go a long ways to detect and stop viruses.
We do not recommend any particular Antivirus but we leave this link a to an AV ranking for this 2021 from PCWorld. If you are looking for a corporate environment with more than 15 machines we would recommend going to a centralized solution where you can easily overview the status and scans of all the machines from a single pane of glass.
The second step is to create a backup policy and follow it strictly. If the first step fails and we get the system infected having a backup of the data may be the only way out without having to pay the ransom. There are some ransomware where people figured out how to disinfect the device and recover most of the information. Nevertheless there is only a portion of the ransomware where this can be done.
Something that must be considered when paying a ransom is that they are already in the system. Even if the cyber-criminals unencrypted all the files there is no warranty that they exited your system or that they haven’t extracted the system information.
Analyze your own infrastructure and decide which can be the most suitable path for you to implement this simple steps and additional ones to ensure your system security.
Have a great day!