You can feel the pain and resignation in his words. And the embarrassment for having his network exploited and his customers’ data put at risk. He thought the cybersecurity in place was sufficient.
A payroll software company in the USA had their systems breached on February 19th. Ransomware was released onto their systems and their disaster recovery site was mirroring their live site. As a result, their backups and failover systems were also encrypted.
24 hours later, they felt the quickest way to restore the data was to pay the ransom. The decryption process, though, broke many file directories and rendered many executable files unusable. The full story is here…
It will be interesting to see how this plays out and whether the company concerned will be able to weather the storm. Unfortunately as much as 60% of small to medium businesses that get hacked are out of business 6 months later.
We have the tools at our disposal to mitigate the risk of these types of cyberattacks. So many businesses still have their heads in the sand and think only big organisations are targeted. In reality, smaller businesses are often the target because their defences are quite often fairly low. It doesn’t have to be expensive to defend yourself. There a few tips listed below but why not get us to have a no-obligation look at your network and perhaps offer some guidance as to best practice for your business.
- Three words… backup, backup, backup. And 3 lots of backups, on different storage types if possible and at least one copy offsite all the time
- Have your email filtered
- Isolate your backup data from your active data
- Disable Remote Desktop unless you’ve had the recommended security modification carried out
- Keep all the security patches up to date on servers, computers and routers
Cybersecurity is evolving at a rapid pace. It’s impossible to keep up with the changes unless you’re constantly being trained and educated. We concentrate on training in this area and many of our customers have chosen to update their existing cybersecurity practices and defences. We’d be happy to share the info we have with you and discover the best ways of keeping your network safe.
We never want to hear anyone say they had to pay a ransom. Give us a call today on 1300 858 723 and have a chat to one of the team. It’s worth a few minutes of your time.
We partner with Barracuda Networks, Cisco, HP and Microsoft to make sure you’re as safe as you can be.
