Are you protected from Ransomware?

Are you protected from ransomware? It may be worth your while to read this little story...

I would just like to relate a story from the other week. We have a customer who has used Abraquest since 2017. Unfortunately they never wanted to pay for Abraquest Software Assurance or for the Abraquest Automated Backup product. Actually they did - about a year after their free six months, they paid for assurance just for one year but without the online backup so they could get some changes made cheaper than if we had charged.

I received an email from them the other week saying that they had been the subject of a ransomware attack and that the Abraquest database, and all backups that they had made at the school were encrypted by the attack and could not be restored. Could I help as they had lost the entire books entered and all borrowing history?

I'm sorry to say we are not security specialists, so we were not in a position to help with the attack itself, but we did have a backup that they had made in their free period and not having been asked to delete it, it was still there in our backup system. So this means books owned in 2017 were already there, leaving the school having to do a stock take and load the latest pupils in from SIMS and they are back up and running again.

This is better than having to enter all the books from scratch depending how many books they had actually bought between 2017 and 2021 I guess.

Anyway the moral of this story is, are you sure your backups are safe? If you suffer such an attack, the ransomware cannot find its way into your backup vault inside Abraquest Automated backup as it is stored in our secure cloud. This school could have not only purchased peace of mind, but their data would have been 100% safe inside our backup system all for just £49.95 + VAT per year.

Email us now if you would like to add this option to your Abraquest system. We will even give you a month free to trial it during which time if you don't want to continue for the year we will refund your money!

About the author

Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson has been a software developer since 1983 and has been involved with Abraquest since 2004. He is the director of Spherical Software Limited (www.sphericalsoftware.com), the company that owns Abraquest.