How to Protect Your Business from Ransomware?

What if, one fine day, you turn on your computer and find that you and your employees are locked out of the system? A message displays on the screen demanding a ransom to get back all your data. You have no other option because even your backups have been destroyed. Your company’s operations have halted, and you are losing money with every passing minute. It is not less than a nightmare. But, in reality, many companies have faced such ransomware attacks. Over the years, the ransomware attacks have increased dramatically. The trend of storing data in the cloud, accepting online payments, and doing most business online is rising. That is why cybercrimes like ransomware are also growing.

Ransomware is malicious software that seeks out critical data and devices to encrypt them for ransom. The data can be personal or business files, financial information, or a set of passwords and usernames that can be valuable to the owner. You must either pay up or lose your data forever. It might also threaten to publish sensitive data if you do not pay money. The results of such attacks for businesses who become victims can be destructive. It can also infect the networks through shared locations and can paralyze business operations. It can result in loss of revenue and customers. Thus, preventing and defending against such attacks is crucial for every business as the attacks are taking a toll on all types of organizations, regardless of size and location. Every industry is a target for hackers. They explore possible targets by looking for vulnerabilities, measuring the complexity of an attack, and the potential of paying. Contemporary organizations operate dynamically, and cybersecurity is not always an essential part of their operations.

As ransomware has evolved into a serious business, attackers have become increasingly advanced. They can easily penetrate corporate networks and target backups. Therefore, it is challenging to remediate the damage of an attack. To secure your business, you need to follow a few basic things like having the best antivirus for ransomware in all corporate devices, etc. You can install antivirus and anti-malware programs to conduct regular scans automatically. Along with this, other measures should also be taken.

Measures to Protect Your Organization from Ransomware

• Understand your organization’s environment: Business networks can be complicated, with multiple devices, applications, and services operating at a time. Since any defect is a possible entry point for an attacker, the initial step to prevent a ransomware attack is knowing what is happening in your organization. Service inventory and asset discovery is a crucial part. Usually, it requires using an automated scanner to identify everything connected to a network, along with any known vulnerabilities or defects linked with those assets.
• Keep systems updated: Security patching and updates are necessary for the protection of your business in today’s world. Keeping your devices updated with security patching, next-generation endpoint protection, and managed services will help safeguard against all varieties of malware elements, including ransomware. It is important to install the latest patches and updates for software and operating systems because there is a risk to security in outdated or unpatched systems.
• Back up your data: Backing up your important data, documents or files is vital these days. It will help in decreasing the harm caused by such attacks and infections. It would be beneficial if you store duplicated copies of documents and files at different locations. Make regular and frequent backups of your data and store them offline rather than keeping your backups connected to the internet.
• Educate your employees: It is important to teach employees how to identify phishing and avoid opening or clicking on suspicious emails and attachments. They should also report such kind of activities to the IT department. Something as simple as opening a suspicious email attachment can turn up affecting your whole network with ransomware. Therefore, you must teach your employees to identify phishing attempts and malicious emails or attachments. Scheduling periodic drills to examine and observe the effectiveness of your training initiatives would prove to be helpful. Educating and training your employees about security practices and guidelines for your company can help in preventing the occurrence of a dreadful incident. The best antivirus would not be able to detect every threat always, so an educated and trained employee is one of the most efficient measures to prevent the menace of ransomware.
• Secure Your Server and Email: Decreasing the number of incoming spam emails will assist your company in reducing the risk of malicious attachments getting to your mailbox. It decreases the uncertainties of an employee making a questionable decision. If you have an antivirus installed that can detect malicious emails or attachments and stopping such attachments to download can prevent infection to a large extent. It can scan all incoming emails to detect threats and filter executable files from reaching employees.
• Be careful with websites: Be careful about submitting sensitive information before checking a website’s security. Do consider the URL of a website. Malicious websites may look like genuine websites, but the URL may use different spelling or domain.
• User rights: The greater the privilege given to a user account or application, the higher the possibility of damage due to attack and infection if its credentials are compromised. Give user privileges by default and be resistant to grant high application privilege levels via User Account Control.

Nevertheless, combining these measures with your business-wide security methods will surely help you avoid harmful and unanticipated situations. Do not depend on free antivirus software as it is not always enough to fight ransomware. Such infections can even hide behind a fake free antivirus or other free online tools. It is most sensible to invest in ransomware protection software for prevention and response to alleviate risks. Robust protection software with an anti-ransomware element is significant for any company to ensure network protection. It protects your system from infected threats along with speeding up the performance of your computer, advancing up your battery backups, prevention against frequent crashes and blue screen issues, etc.