The festive season brings with it more spending, more travel, more communications - and more opportunities for cyber crime, warns Veeam.
Warren Olivier, Country Manager for Veeam South Africa, says the South African festive season is typically a time when both consumers and business become less cautious, presenting increased risk of cyber crime.
"People spend more, travel, use their shopping cards at new places, and send and receive festive season greetings. They are less likely to notice suspicious debits off their bank accounts or digital greeting cards from people they don't know."
In addition to being more vigilant at this time of year, individuals and businesses must ensure that their anti-virus and information security systems and backup and recovery systems are effective.
Olivier notes that a particularly fast-growing cyber crime trend is to infect devices and networks with ransomware, which encrypts data, making it unusable until a ransom is paid to unencrypt it again.
For both individuals and businesses, this can prove disastrous. CryptoLocker ransomware targeted to computers running the Windows OS, and its variants, have impacted businesses globally, with some reports indicating that even when companies paid the ransom, they did not always get their data back.
"There is very little that can be done, short of paying the ransom, once cyber criminals have encrypted your data," he says. "It is far preferable to mitigate the risk by ensuring you back up all your data regularly, to more than one device in more than one location. In this way, if your data is encrypted by ransomware, you can resume business as usual using the backed up data."
Veeam recommends every user follow the '3-2-1 rule' for backups: storing three copies of data on two different media, with one copy of the backup off-site,
"You need not become a victim if you employ a pre-emptive practical strategy to mitigate the risks," says Olivier.
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