One of the biggest concern that everyone has these days is – what if their important files get encrypted or damaged by malware – specifically by ransomware? Their months and sometimes years of work will be lost forever. Experts have agreed that the simplest and the securest method against ransomware is to use regular backups, that is, get in the habit of regularly keeping the backups of all of your important files. There are tons of programs that can be schedules or automated to backup your files and there are other programs that can backup your entire hard drive.
And now a developer has come up with a nifty tool called FileProtection to protect files against modifications of any kind including those made by ransomware. This freeware tool can make changes to the file permissions so that no program can modify it. After the installation of this software in your Windows PC, you can just right-click on any file that you want to protect and select Protect File from the right-click menu.
As soon as you take this step, it changes the file permissions to read only both in terms of the file attributes as well as the permission set for all the users in your PC including the Administrators and System. You cannot change these permissions manually without going through some painful commands.
Side effect of the FileProtection is that not only ransomware but also any other program is unable to make changes to your protected files. The changes are simply not possible as the files are rendered read only. Good thing is, you can right-click on these files and choose Unprotect File and it will restore the file permissions so that you can modify them as you want.
FileProtection is not an anti-ransomware and does not detect malware infection. But it is very effective in preventing the file changes as long as you have UAC enabled and you are using a non-admin account.
You can download FileProtection from https://www.reuschtools.com/fipro/fiproe.html.