According to local news provider KARK, local businesses in Conway, Arkansas, have been hit with a ransomware attack. Some of the businesses have reportedly lost thousands of dollars.
Companies impacted by the attack don’t want to go public, but KARK is reporting that multiple files have been encrypted by hackers who are demanding a ransom in exchange for the returned files. Meanwhile, Brian Fletcher, owner of Fixed by Fletcher, a local IT company, has been speaking out to try and help others prevent or recover from an attack.
One of Fletcher’s customers, whom he declined to identify, was down for a couple days after falling victim to an attack despite efforts to recover documents from its four backups.
"Another week, another ransomware attack hitting the headlines,” said Caroline Seymour, director of product marketing at Zerto. “This time it is a geographically focused series of attacks in Conway, Arkansas."
“Like many others in a recent analyst study that determined that 50% of surveyed organizations have suffered an unrecoverable data event in the last three years, companies in Conway are grappling with paying the ransom or losing valuable data.”
The FBI is encouraging victims not to pay, according to KARK, but sometimes businesses have no alternative. Having multiple backups can help companies recover their files, but it’s important that at least one of those backups is not connected to the internet.
“Regrettably, prevention of these attacks is not always possible, but diminishing the threat is. Taking a more dynamic, modern approach to business continuity and disaster recovery (DR) is critical to this. Solutions utilizing continuous data protection and hybrid cloud DR can help organizations like those in Conway better manage their IT infrastructures and achieve IT Resilience – so that downtime of more than mere seconds becomes a thing of the past – and towns like Conway won’t find themselves in the news,” Seymour said.