As covered in IT World Canada, a Canadian company was recently forced to pay $425,000 in Bitcoin to restore its computer systems after suffering a crippling ransomware attack that not only encrypted its production databases but the backups as well.
“They literally had not choice but to pay” because the backups were frozen, said Daniel Tobok, CEO of forensics firm Cytelligence, which is helping with the investigation.
Staff apparently fell for two old ploys: Two of the messages purported to be from a courier company and told recipients the attachments were invoices for packages to be picked up, while the other messages asked officials to open and print the attached document.
How can your business protect itself from these kinds of attacks?
Education is always the first step: Train yourself and your staff on how to identify and avoid these clever attacks.
However, people make mistakes, and every business must have a disaster recovery plan in place. That may start with online backups, but should include a detailed plan of what recovery will actually look like, and how your business will cope with the downtime of a catastrophic attack.
Your data is crucial to your business. Make sure your it’s protected!
