It has been a busy week here at ComTech HQ. We have had another client whose network got hit with ransomware and this time it was Cryptolocker. All the machines had McAfee installed, however Cryptolocker somehow uninstalled McAfee off three of the PC’s on the network and then ran riot. Luckily the client noticed pretty quick something was up and when they rang me I told them to switch off their network until I came across basically limiting further contamination.
This client was very lucky as they had Dropbox which allows for account rollback (just incase things like this happen) so all their files could be retrieved. It does take time to get the account rolled back so in the meantime there has been some inconvenience to the client but it could have been a lot worse.
This is the 6th such attack I have seen in the last 3 months alone (Locky and Cryptolocker being the biggest culprits) and whilst most clients have been able to recover their files unfortunately a large minority haven’t.
Your best defence is always not to get infected in the first place but that is better said than done. Failing that backups are your next line of defence against this type of threat but more specifically offsite backups. Your offsite backups can be as simple as an external hard drive that is kept away from the office but better still are cloud based backups like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive etc. These allow you to fully automate your backups which gives you the piece of mind your files are safe online if anything happens.
So next time you think I don’t have time to take backups ask yourself one question “How long would my business survive if all my files got encrypted?”
About the Author
Hi I’m Chris Wakefield the owner of ComTech IT Support. I provide Cisco, Windows, OS X and Linux based IT Support to small businesses throughout Scotland.
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