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What to Do About Ransomware

A major threat to your organization is ransomware. It can get into your business network through any one of your employees’ email and make for a very bad day. Fortunately, there are a few solutions that protect your network, and give you peace of mind.

Mavidea's Security and Backup Solutions

Starting with a good security and backup solution through a trusted IT Solutions Provider, like Mavidea. If you have this, then you can rest easy knowing your security is covered. If this happens to you, stop what you are doing and call your IT provider (Mavidea) immediately. At Mavidea, we have a 6 step eradication protocol to clear the ransomware and restore your files with minimal downtime.

Although Mavidea will take care of you, it’s always good to prevent things like this from happening to begin with.

Preventing Ransomware

  1. Healthy email skepticism
    • If you receive an attachment from a family friend, coworker, or friend and you are not expecting an attachment from them, then take a minute to text or call them and make sure they intended to send you a file before opening.
    • Another big one – if the email message is mostly blank, and includes an attachment that you are not expecting…it could be a type of ransomware or other malware.
    • Keep in mind that in most cases the email will be ‘spoofed’ or made to look like it was sent from a real person’s email address even though it was not.
  2. A good antivirus software…that is up to date (If you're a Mavidea IT security client - this is taken care of! And always up to date.)
    • Pick a reputable brand for your antivirus and make sure that it's working and up to date.

What to do if Mavidea doesn't cover your IT security and/or backups

If you don’t have Mavidea’s security and backup services, but you get ransomware….

Alert the IT company or staff member who handles virus problems for you. They need to find where the virus came from, eliminate the virus, determine the extent of the damage, purge all bad data, and restore data from your most recent backups.

It’s a real good idea to backup multiple times a day, replicate your backups offsite, and that you verify success daily (all of which are covered by Mavidea Backup services). A ransomware incident could corrupt your local files AND your local backups. In that case, you will need to rely on your backups that have been replicated offsite.  If your backups are not reliable and verified good you could be in a very poor position to recover from a ransomware event.  In business terms this means major dollars and cents.

If you have questions about your coverage with Mavidea, or questions about adding this service to your plan, please email us at jake.davis@mavidea.com.

Stay safe out there!