Ransomware

Ransomware is a program that locks your files and then asks for money to give them back. You arrive in the morning, open the folder you use every day, and every file has a strange new ending. A note on the screen names a price and a deadline. The invoices, the customer list and three years of work are all still there, and none of it will open.

The ransom is the number everyone talks about, yet it is rarely the biggest one. The real cost is the days the business stands still. A clinic that cannot see today's appointments sends patients home, and a shop that cannot price an item stops selling. Staff are paid for a week of waiting, orders are cancelled, and every call explaining the delay does its own quiet damage. That is what closes small companies, not the payment.

Paying is a poor bet as well, because you are trusting a criminal to keep a promise. Some send a key that works, others send one that opens part of the files and ruins the rest. A few take the money and send nothing, or come back later because they now know you pay. The key does not close the hole they came in through, and in several countries paying is itself a legal problem.

Only one thing really saves you, and it is dull, a backup the infection cannot reach. If the backup drive is plugged into the same computer, or the same login can delete it, it gets locked too. What you want is a copy kept off your network, or one nobody may delete for a set number of days. Then you restore, and a closed month becomes a bad afternoon, which is why Hostrena keeps server copies away from the live machine.

Test it, because a backup nobody has ever restored is a hope rather than a backup. Ask for one real file back today and time how long it takes, since that is the number that matters on the bad morning. When Linkysoft is called on the first morning of an attack, the first question is never about the ransom. It is how long the business can run on paper. A cybersecurity review from Linkysoft therefore starts with a restore test before anything else. It is the least interesting hour of the work, and the one that decides how the worst week ends.