How ransomware can be prevented in our daily life?

 

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How ransomware can be prevented in our daily life?

Ransomware is a type of malware threat that attackers use to infect computers nowadays.

If ransomware or an encryption Trojan gets onto your computer, it will prevent others accessing your system or personal files and attacker will inform the victim that the data is encrypted and demand hefty ransom for access to the decryption key after the attacks initiated.

The victim must make prompt payment, often in cryptocurrency shielding the attacker’s identity. If not paid within a specific of time, attackers have no shame in increasing the ransom, and they often threaten to delete your data too. And since you cannot expect good faith negotiations, there is no guarantee the attacker provides the key post-payment.

There are several ways ransomware can attack your computer. One of the most common method is via email spams – with attractive attachments, misleading links or falsifying info that arrive at your mailbox and in hope a user clicks on unwittingly to initiate an attack.

There are several reasons attackers choose the organizations they are targeting with ransomware. It may be a matter of opportunity or attackers might target universities and education centres because students are sharing lots of files. According to recent research, law firms, government agencies, healthcare and financial services are the most attacked industries.

Best practices for preventing ransomware infection:

• Increase security awareness and not fall for phishing emails, spam emails and other social engineering attacks.
• Keep your antivirus software, endpoint protection, digital vaccines and other security software and databases updated.
• Apply the latest patches to you operating systems and applications as soon as possible to reduce the length of time known vulnerabilities can be exploited.
• Configure your windows firewall to whitelist only the specific ports and hosts you need. For example, never ever open remote desktop ports to the internet.
• Limit user access to shared drives by performing proper NTFS permissions management via security groups. Since ransom malware can encrypt only the files the victim has access to, a strict least-privilege model limits the damage it can do.
• Disable SMB v1 protocol; this will help prevent common ransomware like WannaCry from spreading across your whole network.
• Backup your files. The most effective way to handle ransomware attacks is to use the 3-2-1 backup rule: keep at least three separate versions of data on two different storage types with at least one offsite.
• Never use unknown USB sticks: Never connect USB sticks or other storage media to your computer if you do not know where they came from. Cybercriminals may have infected the storage medium and placed it in a public place to entice somebody into using it.

If you’re the victim of ransomware, you’ve hopefully taken steps to end your nightmare and prevent future attacks. For those who’ve yet to have their data kidnapped for ransom, there’s undoubtedly more can be doing to mitigate the threat. We strongly encourage you to note any preventative steps above mentioned if you aren’t currently doing. As ransomware keeps at its current pace, we must plan to beef up our defences against it.