Ransomware is the #1 security threat to businesses and traditional best practices just aren’t cutting it…
The true damage may not even be the cost of the ransom, but the employee downtime, and the business operations. In the blink of an eye, your business may not recover.
What is Ransomware?
“a type of malicious software designed to block access to a computer system until a sum of money is paid”
How can it infect you?
End users checking their personal email or visiting malicious websites and then opening or clicking on certain files.
What can it do?
It can encrypt all your systems data, accounts and even back up files. Leaving you with NOTHING.
How do you overcome it if it happens?
Pay the ransom and hope that they play ball!
What can be done to prevent it?
Above all else, security software can only protect you to 99% of the threats. There are many layers of protection you can implement. Softlink Solutions best practice is to have ALL these layers deployed:
RDS Servers running antimalware – whilst antimalware would help, ransomware is not technically malware (or a virus), however it can prevent some ransomware from infecting your systems.
Crypto Prevent Tool – this is another layer of security software that can prevent ransomware infections.
End User awareness training – by far the most important layer. End users should be made aware to not open emails they don’t recognise or visit sites that could potentially be malicious.
Previous versions/shadow copy – Within windows server you can turn on a function called “previous versions” that allows taking manual or automatic backup copies or snapshots of computer files or volumes, even when they are in use. The limiting factor is hard drive space. To enable this, you may require more hard drives.
Local Backup and D/R on separate network – We would recommend that your local backup and disaster recovery device is imaged to a NAS drive. This NAS drive should be separate to your main network. Having a dedicated network card in your imaging server that communicates to your NAS for backups is recommended. You may need to purchase an additional network card for your server.
Cloud backup and D/R – replicating your local backups to an external network (the cloud) to prevent malicious software from infecting your backup images.
Please contact us for further information on how to protect your business from this very real threat 0845 094 0010.