Ransomware

Ransomware is a program that locks your files and 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 gives a price and a deadline. The invoices, the customer list, three years of work, all still there and none of it readable.

The ransom is the number everyone talks about. 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. A shop that cannot price an item stops selling. Staff are paid for a week of waiting, orders are cancelled, and every phone 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. You are trusting a criminal to keep a promise. Some send a key that works. Some send a key that opens part of the files and ruins the rest. Some take the money and send nothing, or come back three months later because they now know you pay. The key also does not close the hole they came in through. In several countries the payment itself is a legal problem.

One thing 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 along with everything else. What you want is a copy kept off your network, or one that nobody is allowed to delete for a set number of days. Then you restore, and a closed month becomes a bad afternoon. That is why Hostrena keeps server copies away from the live machine.

Test it. A backup nobody has ever restored is a hope, not a backup. Ask for one real file back today and time how long it takes. 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 usually starts with a restore test before anything else is discussed. It is the least interesting hour of the work, and the one that decides how the worst week ends.