Absolutely!... and your employees are the #1 targets.
Yes, one employee opening what he/she thinks is an innocent email or file attachment within that email can infect the entire company network with malware that can lock everything down which can only be unlocked by the payment of a ransom to the perpetrator. Such emails can seem innocent to an employee who has not learned to spot them as suspicious because the email sender can pretend to be trustworthy organizations such as a charity looking to gather donations for a recent tragedy, purport to be the IRS or other government agency asking for personal information or urge the employee to click a link or download an "important" attached fi
The article "Protecting Your Company from Ransomware" written by Debra Innocenti discusses this issue and provides three tips, listed below, for how companies can prevent being the victim of a ransomware attack (Click here to read the full article).
Tips to prevent being the victim of a ransomware attack
1) back up your files
2) create a plan
3) train your employees
Train your employees
The article goes on further to explain that training employees involves teaching them...
- best practices when opening email attachments and interacting with web pages
- information on social engineering and know how to recognize phishing emails
- security training as an ongoing part of personnel management