Last week they were hacked, the hackers took their data, encrypted the data on their server and demanded a ransom to get it back. This is likely to have been a clever virus that claims to have stolen your data.
The problem is that my client hadn’t backed up her Sage data since the start of June, and the IT guy who comes in charges them a lot of money, wasn’t doing general data backups, even though they thought he was. And my client’s PC acted as the server for the whole company so they’ve lost almost everything. From a financial point of view, there’s been massive disruption to the business and they have to rekey all their accounts data for almost 2 months which will have an inevitable impact on sales and profitability. This means we’re not going to have any management accounts and won’t know where we are financially until probably September, which will be 9 months into the year, (trying not to panic…) they don’t know who they owe money to and can’t chase their debtors.
Talking to Techie Sean he tells me that attacks like these are on the increase and we should be taking our backups much more seriously.
So what can we do to keep our businesses safe?
- Never ever ever open an attachment you don’t trust. EVER!
- Be absolutely certain exactly who is responsible for backups, how often they’re done, where they’re kept, how often is an off-site backup done if you don’t back up to the cloud.
- Test that your backups work on a regular basis, ie test that can you retrieve your data.
- Check where your accounts and payroll data is held and make sure this is backed up regularly as well. Personally I recommend backing up accounts data every day – even one day of data entry is one you don’t want to repeat.
- Check you have enough resources for your backups, eg cloud, server, external hard disks or tapes. If data is backed up to the cloud make sure you know the login details.
Backups are like insurance, we hope we’ll never need them, but when something goes wrong we’ll be damn glad we have them. Now I’m off to check with Sean where our backups are!