ENSince Friday 12th May, the WannaCry ransomware has hit 150 countries. More that 45,000 attacks were recorded in countries that included the UK, India, Russia and China.
News reports state that the ransomware threat may have originated from the theft of cyber weapons linked to the US Government. The attack exploited a flaw in Microsoft Windows, identified and stolen from US Intelligence agencies. Microsoft warned that the ransomware attack is a wake-up call, blaming governments for storing data using software with vulnerabilities.
Europol chief warns of another attack
Europol chief Rob Wainwright, said the act was “unprecedented in its scale”. Wainwright, shared more information about the threat. According to Europol’s chief, the ransomware threat – software that locks your data and asks for a ransom– was spread with a worm application – a program that replicates itself in several other computers.
The attack affected multiple industries, including Germany’s Deutsche Bahn, Spanish telecommunications operator Telefonica, and US logistics company FedEx. Another attack was predicted to go out on Monday.
22-year-old stops threat by registering domain for $10.69
The spread of the WannaCry Ransomware attacked was brought to a halt, when a UK cybersecurity researcher from MalwareTech registered a domain that was being queried. While the threat may have slowed down, reports indicate that a new WannaCry version has already been released. The 22-year old, who insisted on remaining anonymous warned people to patch their systems, because the threat is not over.
How to protect yourself from WannaCry ransomware?
Based on the recent attacks ransomware is very much alive and growing as time passes. The best way to prevent ransomware, is to be proactive, by avoid any vulnerabilities to external threats. This means daily backups of important data, and setting up a disaster recovery plan, one, that safeguards a copy of the data. It is also very important that you keep your operating system updated.
Backups are extremely useful, but they do not completely avoid the pain caused by ransomware attack. Restoring the data will slow down work performance as files won’t be available for some time.
Here’s where vBoxxcloud steps in. As we stated before being proactive is the best way to reduce the impact of malicious attacks. With that in mind, vBoxxCloud offers a series of tools that are useful in different situations.
What to do if your files were corrupted or renamed by ransomware?
vBoxxCloud has continuous backup active by default. This means that if your files are deleted you will be able to recover them. Depending on the type of ransomware attack you can use different solutions.
If your files are just corrupted but not deleted, you can perform a Mass Revision Rollback and restore your files to a previous working version. Even if they have been renamed you will be able to restore the content of these files.
For more serious cases, for example if certain files were corrupted and then deleted permanently you have vBoxxCloud Snapshot. You can easily create an identical copy of any root folder, which will preserve all file history.
WannaCry Ransomware threat is still active
New variations of the WannaCry ransomware have appeared, this time, without the loophole used previously to stop it. Keep your systems updated and consider backing up your data to the cloud.