How to Prevent Ransomware from Costing Your Business: 5 Ways to Prepare

Ransomware attacks don’t just lock files. They can halt operations, destroy critical data, and erase trust in a matter of hours. The average cost of ransomware attacks is now estimated at $5.13 million, with recovery taking an average of three weeks.

Ransomware often enters through email. A link, an attachment, or a message that looks routine can be enough. For businesses, the focus should be on how to prevent ransomware with layered ransomware protection that reduces risk before damage occurs.

In many cases, attackers demand payment before restoring access, but the greater cost comes from downtime and disruption. Learning how to prevent ransomware through effective ransomware protection is the only way to limit both.

What Happens When you don’t have Ransomware Protection

The financial toll of an attack comes from several areas.

Let’s break down the costs:

• Payments and Data Recovery: The ransomware payments extorted by attackers averaged $2 million, and the average cost of recovering lost data was $1.4 million.
• Ransomware Induced Downtime: Opportunity costs of a system lockout will vary with every company, but can potentially be higher than the ransom. To minimize downtime losses, have a disaster recovery plan ready to remove ransomware from your systems.
• Reputational Harm: The damage to victims of ransomware attacks has far-reaching consequences beyond immediate financial losses. This includes lost confidence from the public and their liability to existing clients who also suffered business losses or had their data stolen.

Unfortunately, the volume of global ransomware attacks is increasing, and these costs are only projected to rise.

Learning How to Prevent Ransomware is Essential for SMBs

Shielding your business from ransomware is important for every type of business or government organization, but especially smaller companies, which may not be able to survive the extended downtime or have enough IT resources to fight back. Therefore, attackers expect them to cave in to ransom demands. Every small-to-midsize business has to think practically about how to prevent ransomware attacks, and should invest in a reliable security solution for ransomware protection.

Best Practices for How to Prevent Ransomware Attacks

Here are five defenses that every business should add to its ransomware protection strategy.

Backups For Ransomware Protection

Create a backup for all of your most important files, and then back up your backups. To be truly effective against modern ransomware threats, it is necessary for backup files to be refreshed regularly, multiplied with several copies, and isolated in separate locations. Then, test the recovery process to see how long it takes to get back online, and make sure everything works. This countermeasure can mitigate the worst damage from an attack and is the foundation of ransomware protection.

Patching and Updates for Ransomware Protection

Operating systems and software applications need the most recent updates to maintain their defenses against the known exploits that attackers will use to pass along ransomware. Always take the time to make sure your systems are up to date.

Employee Training to Prevent Ransomware

Every employee shares responsibility for ransomware protection and should know what to look for to confirm email legitimacy and identify the signs of a phishing email. This means knowing who the sender is, checking for signs of phishing attacks, and avoiding messages with unscanned attachments or links that might install ransomware.

Endpoint Protection for Ransomware Defense

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is a tool that monitors your devices and analyzes threats in real time, then automatically neutralizes them. It can stop attempted ransomware attacks when they get past your other defenses.

Access Controls for Ransomware Protection

This is also known as the Principle of Least Privilege, and it’s a best practice for all types of data security. You can’t give up what you don’t have, and neither can an employee compromise the systems that they don’t have access to. Limiting individual access privileges to just the systems, documents, and other vital information that are necessary for their jobs means that when someone accidentally opens up ransomware, it does not shut everything down.

Be Proactive about Ransomware Protection

Preparation is the key to effective ransomware protection. Explore our ransomware threat strategic guide for practical steps to strengthen your defenses and reduce risk. To better understand how to prevent ransomware from holding your business hostage, you can also take our free email risk assessment. This 2-minute survey will show you exactly where your ransomware protection needs to be stronger. Then, Guardian Digital’s IT experts can advise how to stop email-based ransomware from derailing your business.

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