Preparation crucial to easing cyberattacks

Ransomware is one of numerous online crimes designed to separate people, businesses and government agencies from their money.

The crime typically involves a person or an organized crime group encrypting your data and demanding a ransom payment to unlock it. It's like kidnapping for your data.

We typically hear about big attacks against agencies or businesses like the May 2021 attack against Colonial Pipeline, which had to shut down fuel delivery for several days, affecting millions of people, mostly on the East Coast. In 2023, Oakland was attacked, causing massive disruptions in city services. The smaller city of Oakley was struck in February of this year, prompting the city manager to declare a state of emergency.

I'll leave it up to IT professionals to advise government agencies and big companies, but ransomware attacks can also be aimed at individuals who might wind up accidentally installing malicious software on their computers. And, even though individuals are not likely to pay the multimillion-dollar ransoms often demanded from big institutions, individuals could be asked to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars to get their data back. Even if they pay, there is no guarantee that their systems will be restored, which is one of the reasons authorities advise people not to pay ransomware demands.

Backups are essential

Before I get to how to prevent a ransomware attack, my first piece of advice is to always have at least one backup of all your important data so that you can recover from an attack or any other loss of data. I have all my data on a cloud service and another backup on an external drive. Although there is a very small risk of the cloud data being impacted by a ransomware attack, it is much less vulnerable than the data on your PC. In addition to protecting your data from a ransomware attack, cloud storage