Don’t Pay for Ransomware: Reasons and How to Protect Yourself

No one wants to lose access to their files. Whether because they are very useful in personal, academic or work. However, these can be of great interest to cybercriminals. Its main tool to appropriate our files is the detested ransomware. Normally the authors of a ransomware usually indicate that, if you want to recover your files, you will have to pay a certain amount of money. However, do we really have to pay for it? Worth it?

We already know the ransomware operating scheme. Suddenly, your files are no longer accessible. These can be “recovered” only in exchange for a payment to be made to a virtual cryptocurrency wallet. The most widely used is Bitcoin. In a minority of cases payments are made by some other traditional means of transfer, for obvious reasons. The authors of the attack promise that you will recover your files if you make the payment. To complicate the situation, some cybercriminals give you a series of additional instructions that you must follow carefully in order to make your payment.

ransomware

Now, as we mentioned above, you should not pay to recover your files. You may be wondering why, and there really are two essential reasons: You are contributing to this illicit business, and the chances that you will be attacked again are much higher . The latter is because, if you pay the cybercriminal to recover your files, said payment serves as an unspoken guarantee that, if they attack you again, everything will be great for said cybercriminal since he assumes that you are going to pay him. If you keep paying the ransom , you will be a victim of this type of attack again. Generally, the amount of money in cryptocurrencies that they ask for increases more and more, especially if the cybercriminal is made of files with highly sensitive content for you or the organization you are working for, if that happens.

A very worrying situation regarding ransomware protection measures is that there are several organizations that support the fact that you pay for the ransom and thus recover the files. This rather simplistic way of thinking comes about because you have in mind the possibility that, if payment is made, the situation will return to normal and you will have your files back. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. There are cases in which people have paid and with this, they do not receive what is promised in return. To make matters worse, there are attackers who start putting up barriers or extra steps. The purpose of this is to “complicate” the ease of file recovery. If you do something wrongly, you will not recover anything, even if you have paid all the money requested.

How to act correctly in the face of attacks

The first step to take is to recognize that ransomware is not child’s play, it is a crime like any other. Computer attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and deadly based on actions that should not be performed such as ransom pay. Keep in mind that while payments can be very small, multiplied by a thousand, ten thousand, or millions, those payments can be transformed into large sums of money . For actions like this, the cybercrime industry grows every day, for this reason -among others-, insists on the essential fact of never paying to recover your files.

On the other hand, aim to carry out an analysis of the root cause of this type of situation. There is no doubt that we must increase the security measures in our computer and / or IT infrastructure of the organization for which we work. You can ask yourself questions like, does the firewall have vulnerabilities? Are the organization’s employees educated to deal with security threats?

From this analysis, you can properly implement the protection measures against ransomware. We know that at the infrastructure level, there are various processes that can be carried out in order to improve its security level. However, end users should be aware of such attacks and know about best practices to avoid losing access to their files.

Tips to effectively protect yourself from ransomware

The first and most important: don’t click links to files you don’t recognize. Email is an everyday thing. We receive messages of all kinds every day, and among these are those with attached files. Curiosity is one of the main security threats for the user and only for this reason, he ends up being victims of attacks like this one. We have to take a couple of minutes to analyze what is contained in the attached message that we have received. If the file has a title, format, or if the body of the message contains unusual information, we should hesitate.

On the other hand, you must have good antivirus solutions. It is important to decide on those that provide you with real and effective protection characteristics. However, it is not a matter of just installing and letting the antivirus do the work for itself. It is necessary that we can know its operation and configure it according to our real needs. Thus, we can get more out of it and use our computer with complete peace of mind.

A practice that you can also carry out, if you manage a high volume of data, is the use of services that provide backup copies of your storage disks . Keep in mind that common backup solutions are not robust enough to protect you against ransomware. In addition, cloud storage is not the same as a cloud backup, which means that any service that is responsible for synchronizing or mirroring (a mirror) your data, does not imply that they are accessible later of a ransomware attack.

If you are a user of Windows Office 365 and OneDrive , these solutions have their own ransomware protection mechanism. If OneDrive detects any activity related to this type of attack, it notifies you about it and asks you to verify if you have made any recent changes to your files. In the event that you indicate no, Microsoft tries to clean the infected files and recover them, if possible. So we note that it is important for your storage service provider to focus part of its security measures on ransomware. Since the files in question are the most valuable to us, losing access to them can be quite costly.