In this day in age, we rely so much on our antivirus to protect us from all the nasty virus that lurk on the internet, but no antivirus can protect your system 100% of the time.
Recently we at GT-Systems have been receiving reports of a new virus a variant of the ‘Ransomware Virus’ that crippled the NHS in 2017 called ‘Hermes 2.1 Virus’ this also holds your files to ransom by encrypting it.
If you find yourself in this position and all your files are indeed encrypted finding a solution is very difficult, the attacker will normally ask for large sums of money that needs to be paid in a form of cryptocurrency to receive a key to unlock the files, please be aware that this method doesn’t always work.
Put some steps into your daily or weekly routine by backing up your data, a very simple way is to plug in an external hard drive and simply copy from your computer and paste it onto the hard drive.
Another option is to take full advantage of your free cloud storage if you have a Gmail or Hotmail account, simply sign into your account via the web and navigate, for Gmail customers head over to your ‘Google drive’ and for Hotmail customers head over to your ‘One Drive’ area, if you find that the free storage is not big enough each of these vendors will charge you a tiny monthly fee to increase the storage
For those who want a little more automation there are vendors out there that will have solutions and software to fully automate this process, but as always there is a significantly bigger monthly payment.
We must say to ourselves if we lost our files can we continue working or we’ll never see those precious memories again.
Remember 3 steps of backup
- 3 different copies
- 2 different mediums
- 1 offsite