Ransomware is one of the scariest attacks that we have seen

Once an infection takes hold there are very few options that you have to recover from it.We are seeing that besides the general attacks that occur, now we are seeing specific organizations being targeted.

There have been several Medical Organizations that have fallen prey and of course financial institutions are a prime target as well. The Government is also under attack with a reported 321 separate ransomeware attempts in the second half of last year. Is the Government ready to protect them?

A recent article from GovInfoSecurity has gone into depth about the question: DHS's Response About Infections on Federal Computers Leaves Questions Unanswered.

Even the most sophisticated protection, though it can help prevent these attacks from taking hold of your system, you have to be on constant guard for its footprints. Once it makes itself known to you it is usually too late to recover unless you have a good back up system to recover from. Even so, you may have some loss. While not all versions of Cryptolocker require a full reload, the nastier versions due and lately those are ones we have been seeing. Make sure you have full backups of your data, that they are incremental in nature, and that you are vigilent when working with websites and communications from outside sources. Don't be click happy and meander onto sites that you don't recognize, and make sure that you have a good and up-to-date virus protection software package.

If you are on a network, you need a solid business class firewall that runs software to actively protect you from these kinds of attacks. We like the Sophos line of products for this. For backup of your files we like to use our Gemini 3 Backup Solution. It provides an effective and simple image backup system of your servers that provide incremental recovery. It makes it simple to look for the first attack point to recover from to provide a safe recovery of your system. Talk to our representatives to learn more about these products.