You Can Be Hit by WannaCry & Be Completely Fine

Here’s How

The ransomware virus shutting down computers all over the world was hard not to notice this weekend. The ransomware mainly targeted Russia, Ukraine, and Taiwan. However, as of Monday, May 15th, there have been over 215,000 of WannaCry in 212 countries.

The worm is self-replicating and derived from a National Security Agency (NSA) exploit that was publicly released last month. Microsoft released a patch back in March, which fixes the problem and thus protects against the worm, but computers that had not installed the update were vulnerable.

What kind of damage was this worm really causing? On the surface, any global outbreak or contagion is concern just by its sheer size. This thinking wasn’t crazy, but it is the year 2017 — the globe is connected by one of the fastest infrastructure systems humans have ever created — the internet.

This complicated event affected many people and could be the end of the world for smaller businesses that got hit. We’re going to discuss how you can ensure that the next virus outbreak isn’t detrimental to your business.

Protection

As an organization and as an individual, you have a few different options for protecting yourself and your data. This strategy should be defined by your business’s framework — or — this is defined by how long your business can stay down, or how much data you can lose, and still operate successfully. You invest in protection to enable productivity.

Anti-Virus

The WannaCry attack automated the exploitation of a Microsoft Windows operating system vulnerability. An anti-virus solution, like BitDefender, protects against these attacks. BitDefender uses machine-learning and memory introspection technologies to ensure users are protected against outbreaks.

Further, BitDefender was able to protect against the exploitation of the vulnerability even before Microsoft released the patch.

Prevention

You invest in prevention for retaining the most value of your IT systems.

Computers that are connected to the internet natively come with vulnerabilities. You don’t necessarily need to protect against all the vulnerabilities. Instead, back all your data up. A flash drive or a hard drive could get the job done, but they are also easily damaged and if they are in the device at the time of the attack, they’re rendered useless.

If all your data lives in the cloud by way of a protected data center, even if you get attacked by ransomware you are entirely fine.

Instead of having to deal with an emergency as soon as it comes up and having to calculate your next steps, having a backup lets you deal with the situation easily and with little stress.

Wrap Up

You may not have been hit with a $300 bill to get your data back this time, but next time you could be. Protecting against bugs is an important strategy, but having a backup solution can ensure no matter what, your business will be functioning.