REAL LIFE NEWS: IF YOU ARE HIT BY RANSOMWARE, PAYING THE RANSOM PROBABLY WON’T GET YOU YOUR FILES BACK
by Hazed
If you are hit by ransomware, locked out of your computer with a demand that you pay the crooks in order to restore access to your important files, you may be tempted to pay up in order to get things back to normal. But a new report shows that less than half of those who do pay the ransom actually get their data back.
Yes, what a shock – it turns out you can’t trust crooks to keep their end of the bargain!
Your best bet is to simply ignore the demand for money, and restore your lost files from a backup. You do have a backup, don’t you?
The study, carried out by security company CyberEdge, found that 55% of those surveyed had suffered a malware infection during 2017. The highest rate was in Spain where 80% reported a malware infection, followed by companies in China (74%) and Mexico (71.9%). In the US, the rate was 53.8% and in the UK, 49.5%.
Of those companies who ignored the ransom demands, 86.9% were able to recover the lost data by restoring their systems from uninfected backup copies.
But of those who gave in and paid the ransom, 50.6% reported they didn’t get access back.
So you know what the moral of this story is – make sure you take regular backups and keep them somewhere safe!
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/09/less_than_half_of_ransomware_marks_get_their_files_back/
