5 Best Practices to Protect Your Business From Ransomware

Ransomware is an online threat that continues to develop and evolve to accommodate the motives of cyber criminals around the world. Ransomware locks down your business’s files and demands a decryption key for their safe return, which makes it difficult (or impossible) to move forward with operations. How can you prevent ransomware from destroying your business’s chances of survival?

We’ll go over some major best practices to keep in mind when protecting your business from the likes of both ransomware, and other cyber attacks.

• Have a backup solution put into place: If your business falls victim to ransomware, chances are that the only shot you have of getting your data back, without paying the ransom, is to restore a recent backup of your infrastructure. More often than not, even seasoned technology professionals can’t crack the decryption key, so restoring a backup is the most reliable way of retrieving your data following a ransomware attack (after the threat has been eliminated, of course).
• Set a schedule for regular backups: You want your business’s backup and disaster recovery solution to restore data to as recent a point as possible. In fact, Preferred’s Backup and Disaster Recovery (BDR) device is capable of taking snapshots of your data as often as every fifteen minutes. This is necessary if you want to minimize data loss in the face of a data recovery process.
• Educate your employees about phishing scams: Another key component of preventing ransomware infections is educating your team about how they spread: phishing scams. Hackers hope that victims of phishing scams will download infected attachments or click on infected links, installing the ransomware. Be sure that your employees know what to look for in a phishing attack, like phony email domains, spelling errors, and other sketchy signals.
• Update your software solutions regularly: Those who update their systems consistently with the latest patches and security updates are the least likely to experience hacking attacks. This also extends to ransomware; if you have solutions that are optimized for security, you can prevent phishing attacks from making their way to your inbox in the first place. It’s also a best practice to ensure that your systems are as secure as possible.
• Keep corporate data separate from personal data: Do you know how data is stored on both your in-house workstations, and your employees’ mobile devices? Chances are that if they use laptops or smartphones to perform work remotely, their devices have a combination of personal and corporate data. You should stress that employees keep these two types of information as separate as possible. One way to do this is by storing corporate data in a cloud environment, so that employees don’t have to store it on their mobile devices at all.

As always, the best way to protect your business’s assets is to prevent ransomware from striking in the first place. Taking the time to prepare your business’s infrastructure and train your workforce how to deal with ransomware is the most effective way to keep ransomware as far away from your network as possible. Again, once ransomware has infected your systems, it’s next to impossible to remove through traditional means, and will require that you restore the latest backup of your organization’s data.

For more information about security solutions or backup and disaster recovery, reach out to Preferred at 708-781-7110.