Ransomware and website security

Ransomware and website security – What You Need to Know

By now I am sure you saw the news over the weekend 14th May, that there was one of the largest Ransomware attacks in recent history. This completely took offline much of the NHS and many other local authorities throughout the UK and this has also affected over 150 countries worldwide with over 10,000 organisations being impacted. As a responsible business, you need to make sure that you are protected against threats like this.

What is WannaCry and Ransomware?

WannaCry is the name of this particular piece of software and it belongs to a group of cyber security threats that is known as Ransomware. Ransomware is when a piece software holds your company to ransom by encrypting all of your data on your entire company systems (file systems, email systems, in-house servers, websites etc.) and the only way to gain access to this again is by paying these hackers money for them to unlock your files. This is often paid in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoins as they are untraceable.

How do you Protect Yourself Against Ransomware

Protection against threats like this is actually relatively straight forward. You must be taking proactive steps on a weekly basis to keep your website up to date, patched and secure.
It is also extremely important to know what to do if your business suffers from cyber attacks such as Ransomware or other hacks. No matter how secure your website is, a hacker who is determined to get in often will and this can bring down your entire website and stop it working altogether. This in itself is not only costly in the form of the website not being able to provide the service it is meant to give (i.e loss of sales), it is even more costly to resolve situations like this after they have happened. In these cases, prevention and protection is always cheaper than the cure.

Now What?

As a business, you should be investing in regular website security support which helps to protect your business from threats like this. This doesn’t have to break the bank either, and it is certainly much cheaper than having to rebuild it again from scratch which can be very costly.  Find out more.

We cannot stress this enough, when you are proactive dealing with cyber security threats, your organisation will be safer. Simply sticking your head in the sand and thinking that it will not happen to you has proven on many occasions to be a very bad decision and virtually always results in a cyber attack happening.