
The Anti-Phishing Working Group has been diligent in publishing statistics about influxes in phishing incidents over the years. In a world where phishing schemes are continuously on the rise, it’s easy to fall victim to downloading online applications that result in a virus infection.
Detecting a computer virus early is crucial to prevent damage or data loss. There are common signs that your computer might be infected, including a sluggish performance, frequent crashes or errors, excessive pop-ups, unusual network activity, the presence of unknown programs or files, browser issues, activities of suspicious emails or messages sent from your account, and other abnormal symptoms. In many cases, critical files become inaccessible or corrupted. Worse yet, the hard drive starts to show signs of failure, causing the system to crash.
Ransomware is a type of malicious software, otherwise known as malware, designed to block access to your system or files, typically by encrypting them, and then demanding a ransom payment to restore access. Today’s ransomware is quite sophisticated because it does not just lock the device, but it encrypts every single file stored on the media, one by one. For that reason, the one tip that can prevent further data loss is to turn off your computer or hard drive as soon as you suspect your system has been infected. This tactic will cease the file-by-file encryption process, thus preventing further data loss.
There are steps to recover your data safely. For example, make sure files are recovered to a safe location, which means saving the recovered files to a clean external hard drive or another computer, instead saving the files back to the infected hard drive. There are precautions to take during the recovery process as well. We recommend avoiding the recovery or running of files from system directories (e.g., Windows/System32) because they could contain malicious code. In other words, do not copy system files.
Once files are recovered and verified as safe, it’s critical to back them up to a secure external drive or cloud storage. If performing these tasks appear overwhelming to you, rely on a data recovery service provider for assistance. And if shopping for the right data recovery service provider is a daunting task for you, look beyond expert skillsets by confidently selecting a company that provides fair pricing. This means a fixed price for data recovery service as opposed to an escalating pricing structure that depends on the evaluation of the drive. Fair pricing also means that the company is willing to give its customers a full refund for unsuccessful data recovery attempts. ATP Data Services (www.atpdataservices.com) deeply understand its customers’ needs as it already serves a wide range of customers across industries, recovering data from any brand of storage technology.