Recently, security experts reported about a new tendency showing that small and medium size businesses have become the main targets of ransomware authors. The explanation is very simple: scammers are aware of the fact that employees are curious creatures who can hardly resist the temptation to look at the attachment sent to them by an unknown sender. Besides, they know that after using the virus to encrypt the entire network of the company they can make more – owners of small and medium size businesses are much more vulnerable than home users, so they are ready to pay larger sums. However, you should NEVER think about paying a ransom to cyber criminals because you can be left with no money and no files.
Last month was especially active for hackers trying to mislead random companies and infect them with Spora, BTC ransomware, and many others. To make their employees to open an infected attachment and/or extract the attached file, they have set a bunch of spam campaigns using such titles: Office, Support, Sales, Cleints, Credit Control, Customer Support, etc. Beware that such emails are usually filled with real companies, telephone numbers, names and addresses, so you can easily find them on Google. However, these people have no idea that someone has just started using their names and similar information to mislead users and infect them with malware. Before opening the attachment, you should try to contact the sender first. Also, enable the protected view and disable macros on your and colleagues computers to protect yourself from social engineering.