So the joke goes, ‘at least Dick Turpin wore a mask’.
Ransomware has no need of a mask and is no joke. It approaches our machines stealthily hidden within e-mail attachments, waiting only for our fears and fingers to override our good sense.
It lures us in with impersonation and deception tactics playing on our trust of recognised people or brands and growing fears about online banking, credit and debit card fraud.
Rather than attempting to Hack into machines with difficult to pick locks they wait for us humans to take the bait and do the hard work.
Open the wrong attachment and you are suddenly sucked in to a Ransomware heist. Locked out of your own machines by an invisible Dick Turpin called encryption software.
Unlocking your IT plus clean-up costs alone can be a big surprise as annual maintenance agreements are unlikely to cover the cost of recovering from Malware attacks.
The attacks are random and don’t tend to target big companies. They tend to pick on small companies with weak IT security defences.
So what to do?
Check with IT suppliers that you are doing all you can to identify and prevent attacks across all users
Insure Data Reinstatement costs following a Malware attack and check what security and safety conditions apply
And if you’d like more information on Ransomware attacks, you can see what Microsoft has to say about it here: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/mmpc/2016/05/18/the-5ws-and-1h-of-ransomware/