Back Up!!!
The easiest solution to ransomware is to prevent the consequence in the first place. A good backup/ disaster recovery procedure should be in place to recover as much data as possible before they were compromised. This comprises having daily/weekly/monthly, multiple copies of essential company data. An additional line of defense would be to have online backups. Companies should also endeavor to keep at least one set of backups offsite.
A regular backup schedule is only as effective as when the last Data Restore worked. Files Backed up should be tested once in a while to be sure they work.
When this doesn’t work, Companies are forced to pay up. Affected Companies fail to admit it, Very few even admit to been affected by Ransomware, Even this doesn’t work out 80% of the time. There are instances where the ransomware’s decryption routine failed to unscramble more than 100 of the thousands of encrypted files.
Other instances where the Company/Individual pays the ransom and the files don’t get decrypted.
There’s also the issue of Criminals having a backdoor to the network through the “decrypted” files.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2901672/how-to-prevent-ransomware-what-one-company-learned-the-hard-way.html
http://blog.lookout.com/blog/2015/01/15/mobile-threat-report-2014/
http://www.secureworks.com/cyber-threat-intelligence/threats/cryptowall-ransomware/
image link: http://www.pvisoftware.com/blog/wpcontent/uploads/2014/05/prevention_is_better_than_cure.png
