Ransomware attacks on businesses rise

Around a third of all U.K. businesses have experienced ransomware, according to one new study. Many of these attacks came in the form of an email notice that claimed to be from an official government or law enforcement agency. The email would ask the recipient to pay for a crime or violation that they hadn’t committed. In some other instances, cybercriminals utilized a flaw in Adobe Flash Player’s coding to infect computers.

Ransomware is a type of malware that holds computer files ransom through encryption in return for a payment through a online payment system. Even if you were to pay the ransom price, there is no guarantee that the files being held will be returned to you.

According to SC Magazine, 31 percent of businesses in the U.K. said they’d pay the ransom money rather than lose the files. Predictions for the amount of ransomware for 2015 were high, but not many experts thought ransomware would be so prominent.

According to Dark Reading, part of the reason there has been so many attacks is because it is highly profitable and can be easily bought, sold and used. Tox, one of the newest families of the malware, requires very little skill to use and is being sold to many criminals across the internet.

Security professionals are urging businesses to reexamine how they handle threats and to have a plan in case they are attacked. Businesses are being advised to improve their security measures and back up their computers often.

Protecting your business or organization from ransomware
While consistent updates to your current antivirus solution and frequent backups of your system’s hard drives will help, it’s not going to be enough in most cases. It’s better to add multiple layers of security to your system.

Faronics’s Endpoint Security is a solution that does just this. It protects your system from threats before they get to your machine and will identify and remove any threats that make it through those first lines of defense.

In the event that most of the preventative layers of security fail, Faronics’s Deep Freeze is able to easily restore your system to the way it was before the threat found it’s way onto the computer. Deep Freeze does more than just keep your files safe. It will restore your programs and settings to ensure that the computer is 100 percent back to the way it was before an attack took place.