If you work from home, the need for IT support is extensive, whether it is down to having the right hardware, getting new software in when you need it, or cyber security.

The last of these is a growing issue in an age when it is not just individual rogue actors sending viruses and acting maliciously, but organised crime and even state actors.

As Tech Radar explains, ransomware is now the weapon of choice for criminals. It involves sending viruses that encrypt your data and demanding a ransom to allow the data or access to be restored. This will happen when the ransom is paid and a decryption tool is sent.

This places victims in an invidious position: Do they pay up or struggle without the access they previously had? Ransomware is often aimed at large organisations with a lot of money, so it can be more lucrative for the crooks. But anyone can be vulnerable, and for those who are self-employed and don’t have a huge income, this can be ruinous.

However, to get the ransomware into your system in the first place, you must fall for a trick, such as clicking on a dodgy link in a phishing email. Other vulnerabilities exist, such as an open file share, which was the entry point for WannaCry, one of the most notorious ransomware attacks to date.

As the article notes, awareness is a good way to stop people from falling for scams, but so too is backing up data, so that you have a second, isolated copy of everything that you can still access even if a database is encrypted in an attack. This can be established with expert IT support.

Among the extra steps you can take are getting good anti-virus software that can spot ransomware, keeping your spam filters on and making sure your software and applications are updated.

With the right help from the experts, you can keep your systems much safer and ensure that working from home does not mean you lay out a welcome mat for cybercriminals.