Here is another case of a business that did not keep good backups. Hancock Health of Greenfield, Indiana has paid hackers $55,000 to unlock systems following a ransomware infection. Details may be found at: http://zd.net/2mPihl0.
Sadly, ransomware problems are easily avoided by following good data management techniques. Briefly, backup software that does not copy files to mapped drives (such as to Dropbox or to Google Drive) will always be safe from ransomware hackers. You can find a number of good backup products that back up everything, including hidden files, operating system files, and more. They also will keep multiple versions of backups. Even files that have been deleted or overwritten locally can still be recovered from any good backup product. If you’re overwriting previous files, that’s not backup, it’s one-way syncing or mirroring. Any backup program you use should allow you to retain several previous backups, or with file backup, previous versions of the file. The better software will retain and cull older backups according to criteria you establish.
If your computer was infected by ransomware this morning, simply revert to yesterday’s backup or to a backup from the day before or from last week or even earlier. All good backup products are capable of doing that.
You can find dozens of articles on the web that tell how to avoid ransomware problems. For a list of such articles, look at: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+avoid+ransomware&t=hf&ia=web.
However, advance measures are required! If you wait until after your computer(s) has been hacked with ransomware, it is too late. Benjamin Franklin may not have been a data processing professional, but his advice still works: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
Categories: Online Privacy & Security
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