WannaCry Cryptoware, In Business Terms

by May 15, 2017Managed IT, News, Protips, Thoughts

The news media has made “WannaCry” a household name over the weekend, to the joy and fear of I.T. pros everywhere.  On one hand, techies have a great opportunity to talk about managing risks and presenting their lovely solutions!  On the other hand, they’re dealing with things that distract from your core mission – running a business.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be discussing the WannaCry outbreak with our MSP customers as part of our Virtual CIO offering.  We’re going to be re-checking that each customer has a specific plan, appropriate to their needs, for dealing with these types of risks.  Of course, this is just the latest example of how malware and ransomware have organizations losing sleep, so our discussions will involve the broader subject of protecting against cyber risks.  Through those discussions, we’ll be helping customers to answer some of the following questions – maybe they can help you think about your own I.T. situation:

  1. Should you just pay the ransom?
  2. Could your backups be locked out too?  If so, how do you restore?
  3. Are your systems being patched and updated, reliably?
  4. Do employees know how to be skeptical of email and attachments?
  5. If you do need to revert to backups, how long will you be down?  What are you actually restoring?
  6. Once a computer has been infected, can you ever really trust it again?

We’re confident that the systems we put in place for customers will provide a solid foundation upon which they can make business decisions for dealing with these situations.  How about yours?

Sometimes pundits will offer flippant responses to the question of “what do we do when we get hit?” such as restore from your last good backup, make sure you have good email filtering and anti-malware installed, be on current versions of software and always patch.  These are merely platitudes.

In short, business leaders need to realize that any malware event like WannaCry is bad news.  It means lost revenue, lost productivity, and lost profit.  It means your business isn’t able to run.  It means employees moods will worsen.  Even if you have great backups, even if you have great tools, even if you don’t have to pay the ransom, the impacts are real.

Companies who plan accordingly, who implement smart protective measures, and who are able to stay on top of their systems will have a competitive advantage in their market.  The less of your time and money you have to spend to gain this advantage, the better off you will be.

Nomerel can help companies of any size obtain the peace-of-mind that comes from having good systems, well implemented, and a solid plan in-place to minimize disruptions – from WannaCry, or any other form of malware.  See how we can help you out as well.

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