You may have heard in the news that numerous organizations have been attacked by Ransomware in recent months. Ransomware encrypts files so they can’t be opened or used until an organization pays a ransom hoping the hackers will then be honest and decrypt the files.

Backups and disaster recovery systems which are properly designed and configured to be offline and use separately secured accounts for access are essential for recovery to avoid paying ransoms. But remediation is still costly, time consuming and disruptive.

There are many preventive measures that your IT department or service provider can put in place including end-point security, mail filtering, etc., but each of these has a cost and no preventive measure is 100% reliable as hackers are always looking for and finding new ways compromise systems.

But did you know that you can help?

That’s right! A large percentage of attacks occur as the result of an employee opening an email attachment that contains a Trojan payload. So the simple rule is this… resist the urge to open any attachment you are not 100% sure is safe. And if you don’t know, ask first. Do you want to be the employee who shut down your company? Like Smokey Bear says about campfires, only you can prevent opening attachments you aren’t sure about.

As always, if you have questions, are seeking guidance or would like a professional assessment of your preventive and/or backup and disaster recovery posture, give Exelos a call today at 724-834-1000 or email [email protected].