How to protect your online business from ransomware

I guess everyone has heard about ‘wanna cry’ ransomware – here is how to protect your business.

Ransomware is this lovely virus that get’s in your computer. It encrypts (scrambles) all your documents and data. Then you get a demand to pay money.

The people behind the ransomware are so smart, they can’t be caught by the cops – so no sense in asking the local cops or the Federal police. How come they are untouchable from the police:

• they use digital currency which can’t be traced to a bank
• they use the dark web where the authorities can’t identify them

The only way to fix ransomware once you get it is:

1. pay up – it’s generally around $1,000 but can be up to $4,000
2. recover a clean backup that is old enough before the ransomware attack.

You need to have pretty good backups as they don’t encrypt everything today, and demand the ransom tomorrow. They leave it a few days/weeks – to give you a chance to overwrite your backups with the encrypted version and copy the encrypted version to the cloud.

Your backups need to include daily backups, weekly backups, and monthly backups. The old school design was 21 backups, 14 daily backups, 4 weekly backups, 3 monthly backups.

You need plenty of backups because it might take you time to find out that you have the ransomware.

You need everything backed up that you use to run your business. This includes:

• word documents
• spread sheets
• emails
• artwork – for brochures, websites, source images for website etc
• photos

Our hosting provides 100 backups, plus monthly backups for ever. So no matter what the disaster we can recover your online business assets – website, emails , website images , blog posts – anything that you’ve stored no your hosting. If you are hit by a ransomware virus we’ve got your back.

By Scott Farrell on May 23rd, 2017 , Follow @scott_WordPress Tweet to @scott_WordPress