Until recently, Information Security has not been a great priority for most small and medium-sized businesses. The probability of a cyber attack (unless your company was in R&D, financial or healthcare business) was low. It has all changed within recent years, and a new type of crime syndicate is to blame for this shift –  Ransomware Attacks. 

Here’s what you need to know about Ransomware Attack criminals: 

• They are agnostic about what line of business your company is in: CPA, Real-Estate Development, Law Office or any other area. They simply scan everyone hoping to find a network they can penetrate. 
• These criminals are proficient and patient, the majority of these attacks are carefully planned and executed over a long period of time. It may take over six months from the initial penetration to a developed attack. 
• From the point of penetration, they make steady lateral moves to obtain elevated network credentials to assume total control of your network. 
• It has been estimated that there’s a big chance that any small to a medium-size business is already penetrated or under a penetration attack. These attacks are undetectable with conventional security tools. 
• Many businesses have no choice but to pay the ransom. This encourages the attackers to continue their efforts and seek new victims.   

The good news to all these scares: Cloud Platforms make it easy for small businesses to have Enterprise-Level security. The following steps can make your network a lot harder to compromise:

• Move your data to Cloud Platforms and secure access to it. Keep in mind, you need to accommodate and protect access to your data not just from PCs but all sorts of mobile devices!
• Examine existing access to your data and tighten-up your elevated permissions.
• Place intelligent threat detection in your environment. These new cutting-edge tools allow effective real-time threat detection because they are powered by sophisticated machine-learning methodology. Machine learning studies your network and keenly learns normal actions, which makes it easy to identify anomalies and threats.
• Assure you have sound and secure backups. Companies that don’t have sound restore procedures or have weak security of their backups are perfect victims for Ransomware criminals. When a business cannot recover the attacked portion of data from the backups, they have no choice but to pay the ransom. Thus, you must assure that backups are valid and secure.
• Implement DLP (Data Loss Protection) mechanisms. These mechanisms automatically detect the sensitivity of data being emailed out and prevent it from happening.