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As your business becomes increasingly digital, the devices, back-end systems, and applications you’re using generate an overwhelming amount of data —an attractive target for cybercriminals and ransomware.
Ransomware is a pernicious form of malicious software that encrypts data against access by your own business, only to be unlocked if you pay the ransom demand. In some cases it’s possible to crack the code, but the cryptology specialists capable of such feats don’t come cheap. As of 2021, the average cost to recover from a ransomware attack was estimated at $1.85 million.
The increasing number of employees working remotely and on-the-go has created more risk. When your employees exchange critical business data using smartphones, tablets and personal laptops, your proprietary data, as well as financial information, may be exposed and, therefore, vulnerable. Attackers can gain a foothold with something as simple as tricking an employee into clicking on the wrong link or attachment in an email. Hackers are discovering easy targets with the recent surge in work-from-home arrangements and the use of insecure employee-owned devices.
Much like biological viruses, there are many ransomware threats circulating the web. With every occurrence, the sophistication of these viruses is increasing in a multitude of ways, including how they spread and how they encrypt data.
As your IT service provider, we know that protecting your business from ransomware is not a single-prong approach. Being able to mitigate or prevent attacks is our top priority. We have put in place an agile, multi-layered approach that can adapt as new and increasingly hostile threats emerge.
The most basic layer of protection is to monitor and patch all computers and applications. With the latest patches, we can address all known OS Security vulnerabilities. Patching provides the most basic layer of protection to operating systems, especially once a security flaw is uncovered. We provide the latest patches to ensure your operating systems are running at peak performance and that all system vulnerabilities are addressed.
People are being targeted through more sources than ever — email, ad networks, mobile applications and devices. Anti-virus and network monitoring examines all files and traffic, and filters them against all known threats. We keep virus definition files updated to protect these systems
There is sometimes a gap between when a threat is first introduced and when we receive notification and can develop a remedy. We do a full-system backup to protect your back-office systems. This enables us to stay on top of things when an attack occurs and provide a recovery option for unknown threats and even the most catastrophic failures.
“The most important defence for any organization against ransomware is a robust system of backups,” the FBI’s computer crime division has stated. Part of making backups “robust” is ensuring that they are not also hacked. “The time to invest in backups and other cyber defences is before an attacker strikes, not afterward when it may be too late,” the FBI warns.
Although there’s a layer of protection on your back-office systems, you still need to have backup and recovery of data for devices. These devices create, share and store business data, and if a cybercriminal captures this proprietary and sensitive information, it can have a significant impact on business productivity and profitability. We do real-time data backup on these endpoints to prevent business critical information from being compromised.
We want to allow your employees to collaborate securely from any location and using any device — even their smartphones and tablets. Using our enterprise grade, secure file sync and share solution, you can grant access and editing controls for specific documents, such as Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations, and we can help employees to recover documents that are maliciously or accidentally deleted.
The most important step in our process is to create awareness about these threats. We offer training and educational materials to help you educate your employees about cybersecurity risks, new ransomware strains and best practices for spotting phishing attempts, suspicious emails and other security risks. Empowering them to be proactive and encouraging them to report questionable content using rewards and incentives will help increase awareness and decrease overall risk.
