Is it important for small businesses to have effective cybersecurity protocols and recovery procedures in the event of a ransomware attack or hack?

Answer 1

Absolutely! In fact, small businesses often have more to lose than medium to large companies. The latter often have more resources and funds to outlast an attack and cope with the financial fallout. And with even one incident, small organizations run the risk of either not fully recovering from the attack for a lengthy period of time and even going out of business because of the consequences.

Answer 2

The time for small (and medium-sized) businesses is to plan cybersecurity defense protocols and recovery procedures well before exploits (such as ransomware attacks) ever happens - and then taking steps to practice these defense mechanisms and recovery processes on a regular basis (conservatively every two quarters or at least annually).

This makes top executives and CISOs aware of flaws in conducting these processes by visualizing missteps. If ransomware exploiters do indeed succeed in "locking all desktops", small businesses must have backups implemented (maybe real-time in the cloud) and failing that - have a ransomware negotiator on tap (typically connected with lawyers-on-monthly-retainer assigned by the company).

One way to avoid the effectiveness of ransomware attacks is by implementing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Although virtual desktops can reduce the impact of ransomware through centralized management, non-persistent desktops, and keeping data in the data center - they are not immune to attacks.

Ransomware can still encrypt networked data, and VDI environments may be attractive targets due to their centralized nature. To be effective, virtual desktops must be paired with strong access controls, regular backups, employee training, network protections, and consistent patching.