Our View on Ransomware

Ransomware is a virus that infects your PC, and encrypts your important docs, mostly, word, excel PDF’s and images, making them totally unreadable!!

There is usually a request for money to paid, in order to get the documents ‘unlocked’

There is no guarantee of this being successful even if you do pay, and it is likely the money, will go to other criminals.

If you have a backup running, you may still not be safe, as a lot of backups rely on an external hard Drive, or USB stick plugged into the PC.

One of the Golden Rules, is, that if you can view the files from your PC then the Virus can attack and encrypt them.

What can be done?

As well as the normal common sense actions, of having a good AV program, Installed, active and up to date, and avoiding clicking on links in emails, or opening unexpected attachments, and not going on to dubious websites,

Then the best measure is to have multiple backup devices. If you can afford 7 – then back up to a different device per day. 

This gives you 6 or 7 days of backup, so even if you do not notice you have a virus for 3 or 4 days, you still have known good backup versions of your files on one or two other backup devices.

My Backup is in the Cloud. Am I safe ?

Another approach is to Cloud Backup your data.

Be aware though, that if your cloud backup does not have a “versions” facility, (this is where you have numerous copies of the same data done on different days), then if, for example, you back up to the cloud on Monday,

then you get a Virus, that you fail to notice on the Tuesday, then your Wednesday backup, will simply replace your good backup in the Cloud, with Encrypted versions, due to the Virus.

Our Cloud Backup Service has “Versions” available as Standard, so get in touch NOW, IF you value your data!