A very important factor when dealing with computer data is its security.

As with natural viruses, new types of computer viruses emerge almost daily, among which ransomware stands out.

As the name implies, this is malware used by attackers to demand ransoms.

The ransomware encrypts the victim's data so that the victim cannot work with it. After the data is encrypted and virtually unusable, the ransom demand appears.

Usually the ransom demand is made through a message or a text file that appears on the desktop of the victim of the attack. This request usually requires a payment of a certain amount in Bitcoins (virtual currency) because it is much more difficult to track.

The "infection" can happen in different ways. An e-mail with an attachment, a PEN drive that has passed through an infected computer, a link on an infected website, are just some of the main ways of "contagion" when it comes to computer viruses.

Just as science tries to find vaccines and cures for natural viruses, so in the computer world science tries to find the "vaccine" or prevention for these viruses.

One of the main forms of protection is the installation of a UTM(Unified Threat Management).

Some of the main features of UTM are that it can filter internet traffic, thus allowing the detection of the threat even before it enters the network. It allows the blocking of websites considered unsafe. It has a wide range of security and prevention systems that make the corporate network where the equipment is installed much more secure.

But because you can never have too much security, Antivirus remains one of the computer security systems that are considered indispensable.

There are many different antiviruses on the market and they all have various ways of protecting computer systems from virus attacks and other types of malware, but just like vaccines, antiviruses cannot always protect against all viruses. Because before creating the "vaccine" you have to know the virus or at least the "behavior" of the virus in order to create the proper protection.

It is therefore very important to have a backup system that ensures data recovery in case of a disaster.

A company that has an effective and well-structured backup system, when it suffers an attack by ransomware or other viruses, can resort to backups to restore the normal operation of your company with a reduced impact in terms of downtime.

There are different forms of backups with different characteristics.

The different types of backups differ in some respects. Retention time, type of storage, frequency of copy task execution, location, type of copy (incremental, full, among others) are some of the characteristics of the copies that will guarantee greater or lesser efficiency in data recovery.

In addition to local backups, we can also add another layer of security to data protection by creating offsite backups.

Offsite copies do not replace local copies, but they do add security to the data by ensuring that even if all the data on site is compromised, there is still another location where the data is safeguarded, whether in the cloud or even at another personal location.

In case you suffer a ransomware attack or infection and you don't have all or any of these protections, there is still the possibility of trying to decrypt (decrypt) the data.

It really is a last resort, but in some cases it can work.

The main antivirus manufacturers make available for free on their websites some tools to decrypt data affected by the main types of ransomware.

Besides the manufacturers' websites, there is also the "no more ransom!" project where different police institutions and manufacturers join forces to fight this kind of cybercrime. Here we can find not only tools to try to recover data, but also some advice that can help us protect data from these and other threats.

So there are several ways to protect ourselves from the threat and several ways to recover our data in the event of a disaster.

Now that we know how to protect ourselves and how to recover our data, it is also important to know that we should never pay the ransom demanded by the attackers, because of all, this is the reaction that gives us the least guarantees.