IDG Contributor Network: Ransomware: 7 tips for recovery and prevention

I had arrived home from visiting my family last Saturday around 10 p.m., and noticed a couple of email messages arriving from a CPA customer, just before I went to bed. I took a quick glance, immediately spotting the phrases “none of our programs work” and “all the file names on our server have changed.” Those phrases were all of the symptoms I needed. As I would confirm later, the customer had been struck by ransomware. 

For the uninitiated, ransomware is a rather insidious form of malware that attempts to render all of your important files unreadable, until you pay the perpetrator a ransom to restore them. This malware was first seen in Russia in 2011, and by 2013, it was well entrenched in the United States.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here