Organizations from Cosco to FedEx, local governments from Atlanta to Alaska, and several hospitals and law firms around the world all share a common, jarring experience - in the past few years, all of these organizations have watched as malicious software took over their networks and demanded a ransom payment, while disrupting their business service continuity.
Ransomware is an escalating, increasingly sophisticated threat, and no one seems to be immune. With new ransomware authors constantly upping their game to evade detection by demanding new forms of crypto-currency, such as DASH, or stealing passwords and Bitcoin wallets, it can be difficult for the average user to understand how they were infected in the first place when they fall victim to an attack.
There are a number of attack vectors ransomware can exploit to take over computers or servers. These are the four most common ways ransomware infects its victims.
Related: protect your business from cyber attack with the best antivirus software.
1. Phishing emails
The most common method for hackers to spread ransomware is through phishing emails. Hackers use carefully crafted phishing emails to trick a victim into opening an attachment or clicking on a link that contains a malicious file.
That file can come in a number of different formats, including a PDF, ZIP file, Word document or JavaScript. In the case of a Word document, the attacker most commonly tricks the user into “Enabling Macros” upon opening the document.
This enables the attacker to run a script that downloads and executes a malicious executable file (EXE) from an external web ser ..
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