What can you do to prevent getting infected with Ransomware?
Have you heard the term Ransomware and your eyes just glazed over when someone tried to describe it? Well, you’re in luck. My attempt here is to give a simple explanation of what it is, who it affects and what you can do to help avoid it.
What can I do to avoid getting infected? In my opinion, the best way to avoid it is user training. Whether you’re a small business or a home user, the biggest security hole are the people using computers. When you get an email from Facebook or LinkedIn for an invitation, don’t click inside the email to accept it. Go straight to those social media sites and look for the notification there. These are very commonly spoofed emails called phishing. Many of them look very real, but if you look closely enough at the emails, you can see the discrepancies. Look at the actual email address (hover your mouse over it and it will show you a pop-up window of the actual email address, not just what is being displayed). Does the email address have @linkdin.com or the actual @linkedin.com domain? Another common phishing scam may include IT support asking you to reset your password. It gives you a link to click and it captures that information, so now they have your username and password. If you can be diligent on what emails you click on, this will be a major deterrent in the chances of you getting infected. It takes very little time to look at a suspicious email and contact someone to verify if it’s valid or not before clicking anything in it.
Other ways to help protect are:
- Get a good antivirus for your computer. There are many good ones out there and they aren’t very expensive.
- Always back your data up and do it from two sources if possible. I like to have my businesses clients back up their data daily to both a local hard drive or network source, as well as in the cloud (off site).
- Do not provide personal information when answering an email, unsolicited phone call, or text message.
- Use a good firewall in your home or business and make sure it has active scanning and protection of anything coming in.
- Make sure all your systems are up to date with relevant Windows and security updates.
Bottom line: Ransomware attacks are real and growing. I have personally worked 2 separate incidents in the last 6 months for businesses in my area that I’ve supported. Fortunately for them, in both cases, we had previously audited their backup systems and made improvements to capture and backup all of their data. In both situations, had we not, they would have lost real data that was important to the business.