In what should not be a surprise to anyone reading this, 2017 surveys have shown that ransomware attacks against businesses like yours increased in 2017 over 2016. (4.3 times as many to be exact) The hackers behind these attacks have been so successful in monetizing their attacks that they have tremendous resources at their disposal to hone their craft. The end results are attacks that are more sophisticated and more destructive. If you are unsure what ransomware is, please see our video.
2017 saw attacks like WannaCry that did not use the traditional methods of infecting computers. Email attachments and links are still the most common method of contracting ransomware, but we are seeing different threat vectors targeting businesses. In the case of WannaCry, it attacked vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system. Users did not need to click on a bad attachment or go to a bad web site to be infected. They simply had to be targeted and not have installed the patches that Microsoft provided for the vulnerability.
2018 has seen a rise in ransomcloud viruses which attack cloud services like Microsoft Office 365, a popular email platform. Users would receive an email appearing to be from Microsoft and prompt the user for credentials. Once provided, all of the users’ email would be encrypted and unreadable without the decryption key, which the hackers held for ransom.
We, of course, encourage users to never, never, never (you get the point) pay the ransom. Paying the ransom perpetuates the cycle by giving the bad people more resources to put toward their scams. Once you have contracted a ransomware virus, restoring from backup is the best way to recover your data. Cleaning the infection out of your system should of course be the first step in remediation, followed by restore. For ransomcloud viruses affecting Office 365 it is important to note that businesses have options. There are reliable and cost-effective solutions for providing comprehensive backups to your Office 365 (or Google’s G Suite) data. Having this extra layer of protection can come in handy for other reasons in addition to malware as well. Want to recover an email from two months ago? How are you going to do that? With our solution, a simple phone call or email gets the process started. Too much business is conducted via email in today’s world to leave your email recovery to chance.
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