Ransomware exploding across business PCs and websites
Highlighting the need for both office IT security and user education, a range of high profile companies including US hospitals and many smaller organisations are finding their business data being encrypted by digital thieves and held to ransom. The new threat appears in the form of an email, with an invoice attachment. Most companies with email and spam filtering will prevent users from seeing this email. However, if it arrives via a personal account to a less aware user, it can still wreak havoc across a company network.
Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center is the highest profile casualty, with its patient and system data being held hostage for over $3 million (http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/16/the-hospital-held-hostage-by-hackers.html). All it took was one worker to open the wrong file and the attack invaded all PCs via the hospital’s networks and locked away their data, which can only be freed by a huge pay-out. Many companies just pay up to avoid the hassle, but could easily become repeat victims. Some cannot afford to, and could see their business collapse, highlighting the need for better all-round PC security.
The thieves demand payment via the digital Bitcoin currency to decrypt and return the data. The only way to avoid paying is if you have a very current backup. It will still take hours, days or weeks of downtime to reimage PCs and reinstall all software and files. We can help with cloud backup and remote storage, as this issue threatens every business. A new variant of the threat is taking whole WordPress websites and servers hostage. As the criminals are very hard, if not impossible, to track down, this type of crime, which is easy to duplicate, will only become more common.
If your business lacks the type of disaster recovery and business continuity planning to survive this type and other attacks, get in touch to find out how we can help secure and protect your data, and educate your workers on how to stay safe. At the very least, any business should keep a copy of all business files backed up daily on an external hard drive or USB drive that is disconnected from the network during normal working hours.
