Since most cloud backups do not map to a computer as a drive letter, the backups are safe from being encrypted and can easily be used to restore files. You need the long restore window in the event that recent cloud backups contain the encrypted files and you need to restore from older versions. Therefore, I strongly suggest that users invest in a good cloud backup strategy with versioning and a long restore window. This means that backups on local and network storage could be encrypted as well. This is because ransomware will target and encrypt all the drives on a computer, including mapped network drives, and sometimes even target unmapped network shares. Unfortunately, simply adding an extra hard drive to a computer and backing up to it once in a while is not enough.

This is because you can simply remove the infection and then restore your data from backups. The reality is that if you have up-to-date backups, ransomware becomes more of a nuisance than a threat. Make sure you are doing backups!īackup, Backup, BACKUP! This absolutely the most important task that needs to done to protect their data from being encrypted. If you want to protect your computer and your assets, then I strongly suggest you print this article and read it as time permits. I know this article is long, but computer security is something that takes effort.

Therefore, it is important that every computer user, whether you are only using a computer at home or in the enterprise, needs to understand how to prevent, harden, and protect their computer from ransomware. To help you, I have put together the most important steps a computer user needs to do in order to not only protect themselves from ransomware, but other malware that use similar infection methods. With even the smaller ransomware developers earning a lot of money, the ransomware explosion is going to continue with more innovative techniques used in 2017.

It was otherwise taking close to 1 hour to log in to the server.2016 is almost over and it definitely taught us one thing Ransomware is here to stay and it's only going to get worse. In case someone is using Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection, we had to uninstall and reinstall it in order to be able to RDP into the server.

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