What is Ransomware?

Ransomware is one of the most common types of cyber attacks, and the ACSC (Australian Cyber Security Centre) received reports of over 440 ransomware attacks in Australia from 2021-2022. It's where a bad actor will gain access to your systems, and most likely, encrypt all or most of your files, and only return the decryption key, if a ransom is payed. The other type of ransomware, is where an attacker threatens to release or sell your data if the ransom isn't payed.
This is obviously a very scary attack, as you will most likely have a lot of sensitive, or crucial data you need to access on a day-to-day basis, and losing access to it, may mean that you can't do your job while you don't have access to the files.

What can you if you've had a ransomware attack?

Once a piece of Ransomware has done its work, its not easy to get your data back. Sometimes, there are publicly available decrypting tools for that specific ransomware, however, these aren't common for most ransomware. Sometimes, the best way to do things, is to pay, but this isn't a great option, as you never know if the attacker will be true to their word. The only other option is to start again without your existing data, but for ransomware that threaten to release or sell your data, this can be a hard choice to make.

What can I do now?

There are ways to protect yourself from these attacks, most IT businesses will provide ransomware protection as part of their cybersecurity or managed services package, and if they don't, we'd recommend against going with them until they do.

Can Riverland Technology Services help?

Of course! Riverland Technology Services provides Ransomware Protection standard with all Managed Services, no matter what! We include a ransomware protection system on all computers managed by us, and even if the ransomware bypasses this, we will get a notification as soon as our Ransomware Canaries have been touched by a ransomware software, and can manually stop it before it causes any problems. We even include backups with our Managed Services, so all of your files can be restored in the case of complete file encryption!

Make sure to send us an enquiry below and we'll get you protected against ransomware!