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96% of US companies are not confident in their ability to remove ransomware. Eighty percent have suffered a cyber attack last year, over 1/3 lost revenue,and 20% had to stop business completely.

Ransomware is scary and the chance of getting attacked is increasing. Here’s some statistics from a report sponsored by Malwarebytes in 2016.

Ransomware Statisticsremove ransomware stats

  • 46% of ransomware attacks originated from email (30% in Canada)
  • 40% paid ransomware demands
  • 64% spent more than nine hours to resolve the attack
  • 96% of US organizations are not confident in their ability to stop ransomware

source: Cantech letter

How To Remove Ransomware

In fact, it is not difficult to remove ransomware – if you plan ahead, the study says;

“Switch from protection to disaster planning: The most popular way of addressing the problem is not through protection, but by backing up data (over 71 percent).”

The easiest and most popular way to remove ransomware is to go to your backup prior to the attack and restore the data.

Backing up is something all businesses should be doing as a regular part of their process, and cloud backups make this process even easier. Backup your critical data an set a retention period (the amount of historical days you are backing up) to a reasonable length of time – by default our backup sets a retention period of seven days.

Should you get attacked you will still have some work ahead of you, to be sure, but you will not have to pay ransomware demands and your business will survive and continue to move forward.

Is that It?!

Sounds easy doesn’t it? It does, however, mean that you need to plan, you need to do something now. You cannot recover your data if you do not already have a backup. Trying to do a backup after the fact will only copy the ransomware encrypted files, it won’t help.

You should also invest in protection software so that attackers don’t continue to attack you repeatedly, and this is where products such as Malwarebytes comes into play. Your IT department or consultant should be focused on ransomware especially if you are a healthcare or financial company, as these are the top industries to be attacked.

Start a backup now. Make sure your backups are working properly and make sure they are backing up everything you need should a disaster strike. Test a backup restore to make sure you know the process and that it actually works as expected.

You can beat and remove ransomware attacks with some planning and an effective backup plan.

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