Strong and resilient backups are the most important piece of protecting your business. Cybersecurity is an ever-evolving arms race. Antivirus, spam filtering, and firewall vendors are all constantly plugging holes and vulnerabilities only for malicious actors to abandon their old tricks and find new ones. No matter how elaborate your security mechanisms are, they will never truly be 100% effective forever; there will always be some small risk. Whether that’s a brand-new exploit or users being tricked, malware and scammers will always try to find a way in. Those protective measures also won’t do much good against natural disasters or hardware failure, either.

For the past year or two, a new type of malware, commonly known as CryptoLocker, has been in the wild. Rather than make it appear like you have a dozen viruses and demand money to remove them, the mischief-makers have escalated to permanently damaging/corrupting your files unless you pay to decrypt them. If this occurs, there are only two ways to get your files back: restore from an isolated back-up or pay them, and paying them generally doesn’t work.

In most cases, if you’re a Bennett/Porter IT client, you have a backup system in place. However, please note that it is typically only the servers being backed up. In the event that a user is storing critical files locally, they may be lost if that person's workstation is infected. So, beyond standard anti-virus protection, how can you defend your network from this threat and minimize the damage if it gets through?