Cyber attacks are a worldwide problem and one that is growing at an alarming rate, primarily in North America and Europe. In fact, the increase in occurences jumped by 165% in the first quarter of 2015 over all of 2014.¹ Ransomware, the cash cow of today’s hackers, has become an incredibly lucrative resource, netting cyber thieves millions of dollars a year. From CryptoLocker and Locky to CryptoWall and TeslaCrypt, it's all bad news for vulnerable end users and businesses.

Some high profile attacks in Canada last year included the University of Calgary which paid a reported demand of $20,000 after a ransomware cyberattack as well as Carleton University in Ottawa. According to CBC, the ransom demand was roughly $40,000 there. However, large businesses are not the only targets. A couple of JBM's customers, whom are small to medium sized businesses locally, have been attacked over the last 6 months. Fortunately they had a current back-up that was able to be restored in a relatively quick timeframe. However, they did not escape without downtime, data loss and business interuption. Get the facts straight and protect your data before it’s too late. Many attacks come in the form of emails masquerading from large, well known businesses. Unsuspecting employees simply have to click on a link to release the virus.

The best protection against these kinds of growing threats is to have a complete Business Continuity plan in place. Last year, JBM decided to anti up and 'get with the program' so we did our research and selected Datto as our vendor with the complete solution. They provide us with a simple web-based portal with complete access to our Hybrid Cloud based backup appliance. We have an on premise backup and disaster recovery appliance that provides hourly backups of all servers which then replicate to their secure hosting facility in Toronto. We can also have our data replicated to a second secure facility in Calgary for added redundancy! With image based backups, we can rest assured that in the event of an emergency, our data can be virtualized (restored) both locally on our appliance and in the cloud if needed. With solutions starting for less than $5 a day, any size business can afford to get the insurance they need to ward off those lurking cyber threats. Call us at JBM if you would like a consultation to get your businesses data protection secured.

¹  McAfee Labs: Threat Reports 2015.