Cyber Attacks – What You Need To Know

Financially motivated hackers target many SMBs in North America. With the attack, the infected company or user usually ends up with a banking Trojan ( a hidden file that monitors your banking information), or Ransomware malware (file encryption) in their systems.

Ransomware campaigns are not customized for each organization. They are targeting manufacturing, healthcare and accounting businesses that possess critical data and can likely afford high ransom payouts.

Hackers send out high volume emails, using malicious Word document attachments, impersonating finance-related government entities, or telephone services, internet providers, etc, with tax assessment and/or refund based emails to targeted individuals in organizations.

Here are the best ways to protect your computer against such attacks:

Disable macros from running in office files.  

Always keep multiple days of complete data backups of your important data. Why multiple days? Most data backup programs look for the “difference” in files and back those up at night. Corrupted files are now “different” and can be backed up by the program, overwriting your data. Having multiple days of full data backups allows you to wipe out the Ransomware and move forward. The cost for extra storage is a small price to pay as opposed to the Ransomware, plus business downtime.

When evaluating backup systems, you must think about your pain threshold. How many days can you be without your data? Business owners say they have their data backed up on Drop Box or Google drive, (dangerous) but what is your recovery position if you are hit with ransomware? How do you recover and quickly and get back to running the business?. What assistance do you receive? Can you call Google?

Here are some tips regarding ransomware protection:

1. Run one of the best antivirus software on your system. We recommend Sophos. At the time of writing this post, Sophos has shown to be one of the best at detecting Ransomware.
2. To protect your server, back up assist has a Ransomware detection software to stop a backup if suspicious.
3. Don’t open email attachments from unknown or untrusted sources.
4. Don’t open links from unknown sources. Use the “hover technique” outlined in previous posts.

With new technology being added every day, there are no guarantees as people still represent both the biggest defense and biggest threat in the fight against Ransomware. Give us a call and drop us an email at info@hardsoft.ca and we can talk about protecting your business.