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We have all seen reports in the news in the last year about Canadian organizations being hit by ransomware.  The University of Calgary made headlines when they paid a ransom of $20,000.00 to their attacker.  These malicious attacks are crippling businesses and individuals across our country and it is no longer sufficient just to have a good anti-virus solution in place. A ransomware attack can come from spam email, email attachments, and through malicious web sites set up by the attackers.  Industry experts agree that individuals and businesses need to take a multi-layered approach to protect their data.  Firewall protection, anti-virus and anti-spam solutions all help to protect your precious data.  But what happens if there is a breach and the ransomware attack is successful?  Your files are encrypted and your business grinds to a standstill.  Do you pay the ransom?  Experts would say, no.  In fact, paying the ransom may increase your vulnerability to being attacked again.  The best defense is to have a reliable backup solution in place that makes it easy to restore to a point in time before the attack took place.

GridWay has been selling Online Backup and Recovery solutions for years. What may have once been seen as a “nice to have”, off site digital storage of data is now a “must have”.  Businesses simply have no choice but to invest in a proper backup solution that makes recovery simple, easy, and fast.  GridWay has recently become a Datto reseller in order to give clients more options for backup, recovery and business continuity solutions. Please see Datto’s recent blog post on the topic of ransomware. As pointed out, even Microsoft’s Office 365 can be a target, but luckily Datto has the answer and offers an affordable backup solution for O365 subscribers.  Good thing, because GridWay just became a O365 reseller as well and we want to make sure our clients’ data is well protected.

GridWay has also taken additional steps to mitigate the dangers of a ransomware attack.  We have created a ransomware detection solution that will not only detect known ransomware signatures, but will isolate the infected device as well.   The infected desktop or laptop will be denied access to the network, thereby stopping the spread of the ransomware.  The device can then be cleaned and the data restored.  The solution is easy to deploy and is designed to run on a Windows file server.  At the present time, the solution is available to all of our Total Protection Program clients as well as customers who have purchased our server monitoring solution.