Ransomware!

 

 

 

If you watched the May 5th, 2019 CBS show, 60 Minutes, you’ll understand just how expensive and dangerous to your company’s health that Ransomware is. If you didn’t watch it, you can see it here –
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ransomware-how-cybercriminals-hold-data-hostage-and-why-the-best-solution-is-often-paying-a-ransom-60-minutes-2019-05-05/ or here. And if you’re not convinced, read this from Forbes magazine – https://www.forbes.com/sites/taylorarmerding/2019/07/03/get-ready-for-a-ransomware-tsunami/#1cf79d1b2de9

You can even read the 60 Minutes reference to the City of Atlanta’s ransomware attack. It cost them about $20 million of taxpayers money to recover! Read about it here.

Or read this story about how dozens of companies, plus Texas municipalities lost data because of Managed Service Providers, an increasingly common “cost effective” way that computer services are provided. Read about it here.

See this Nakivo graphic PDF showing how you can protect your business, before it’s too late! how-to-recover-from-ransomware

And it’s not only the people that send emails to employees hoping that just one employee will click the link to download and install the Ransomware. It may also be clicked and activated by a disgruntled employee who “accidentally” clicks a link to cause chaos!

So if you are concerned that you may be put out of business by Ransomware, we can help. Here’s how –

We will install a central, very powerful Network Attached Storage (NAS) server into your LAN. It is the preferred way for your data to be stored, as these ZFS servers are very reliable, extremely fast and may be accessed by individual LAN users using a “share,” such as a drive letter. That’s where all of your data will be stored. Centrally and very secure, rather than on users’ PCs, unmanaged and insecure. Which is better?

Every ten minutes the NAS will take a “snapshot” of any changed files… your important data. That snapshot file cannot be deleted or changed, and saved for four weeks automatically. So you may have thousands of small snapshots over the month, that will sequentially, automatically delete after that month to make room for new ones.

If you are struck by Ransomware and your employees and server computer data is encrypted, subject to you paying a ransom, the snapshots can be rolled back to just before the attack within minutes of discovery!

As Ransomware may encrypt tens of thousands of files that are subsequently saved as one or multiple snapshots, it will be easy to see when the problem occurred as that snapshot(s) will be huge. We then roll the NAS files back, prior to the huge snapshot that will be full of encrypted useless files.

If you are really cautious, a second NAS server can be installed locally or remotely, to incrementally, and automatically backup the first NAS server’s users data. every day into dated folders for each days work to be stored for months and retrieved as needed.

Each day’s data may be stored in a separate daily folder or appended with the current date to avoid overwriting good files with encrypted Ransomware ones, that have the same name.

The logon to the second system will not be accessible to your users, so Ransomware will not be able to directly connect to that system across your LAN or remotely. That’s how Ransomware spreads. If stored remotely across the internet, your data will be encrypted before being sent to the remote NAS.

As an additional measure, we can install Amazon’s AWS S3 Glacier system, with a claimed 99.999999999% up-time that will steadily backup your entire network data for very little money. That system will be not accessible by any user; only a system admin with separate credentials, so Ransomware will not be able to reach those files either.

In this way you are protected, so you won’t have a very nasty surprise on a Monday morning, with a note asking for a $100,000 ransom or you will lose everything! Your choice… it’s cheap insurance or you roll the dice and keep your fingers crossed that it won’t happen to you.

If you’d like to talk about what we can do, let us know. Call or email us below –