How to Protect Your Company from Ransomware
Published on
25 Oct 2021
Ransomware is a huge, albeit illegal, business, and it is growing. So how do you protect your company data from ransomware?
Timely and regular backups that are stored off-site are the best way to protect your company data. Ransomware encrypts your data, then charges your company a ransom to get that data decrypted. However, if you have a recent backup, you can simply restore that backup and continue working.
When Agvance is hosted, your data will be backed up quite often and off-site—meaning it will be stored somewhere other than your hosted server.
Breakdown of How SSI Backs Up Your Data
SSI will back up your current production data at midnight each night with hourly differential backups also being made. This means we can get your data back to how it was on the hour before any ransomware attack.
We also make backups of your prior years data each week. On top of these data backups, we also back up hosted servers on a nightly basis. This means we can revert your machine back to the previous night, should it become infected with ransomware.
So, for example, if your company fell victim to a ransomware attack on Friday at 9:30 AM, we would be able to restore a copy of your server(s) from the night before the ransomware attack, then grab a copy of your data that was made at 9:00 AM that morning. This entire process generally only takes about 30 minutes to an hour.
Keeping Your Server Secure
All Agvance hosted servers sit behind firewalls that can limit remote access. Many of our customers only allow remote connections from their specific IP addresses. On top of this firewall, we also have software on the hosted servers that actively blocks what are known as brute force attacks--when someone tries millions of username and password combinations to gain access to a server.
SSI also keeps our server operating systems and antivirus up-to-date, which helps shore up any software vulnerabilities. Preventing ransomware attacks is a tall order, but we continue to research and implement ways to limit how much damage these types of attacks can do to your business.
Our team monitors resource usage, such as CPU, memory, and disk space via AWS Cloudwatch. This around the clock monitoring is set up for each hosted server. Should any computing resources push past our pre-determined thresholds, our team is notified and can perform any corrective action needed to keep your server secure.
Our hosting vendor, AWS, also notifies our team when it comes to unauthorized use of systems or networks. Once we are notified of unauthorized usage, our team is responsible for providing AWS with what corrective measures we have taken to remedy the issue. This extra monitoring layer makes for an even more secure environment.
If you would like to learn more, read Tips for Protecting Yourself Against Ransomware Attacks and current Agvance users will also want to visit Hosted / Ransomware on the Agvance Help Center. Complete the form below to request additional information.