A KENDAL salon owner wants to warn other business owners about the dangers of ransomware after scammers demanded £30,000 from him.

Staff were using the computer at the Kendal branch of the Jo and Cass hairdressers on Highgate when a message demanding money popped up on screen.

It threatened to delete all of the computer’s records if £30,000 was not sent to the hackers within a short time frame.

Graham Cass, Jo and Cass’ owner, said all of the salon’s appointments had already been deleted by the time technical support arrived.

“If a customer rang up and said can I have an appointment, we had to say no,” he said.

“It was an absolute nightmare.”

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Mr Cass said he was told by IT support not to pay the money as he would not get the information that had been deleted back.

Ransomware is a form of malicious software that, once it has taken over a computer, threatens harm, usually by denying you access to your data.

The attacker demands a ransom from the victim, promising to restore access to the data upon payment.

There are a number of ways scammers can enable ransomware to access a computer.

One of the most common systems is phishing spam.

These are attachments that are sent to the victim in an email, masquerading as a file they should trust.

Once they are downloaded and opened, they can take over the victim’s computer.

“We had to buy new computers,” said Mr Cass, explaining that clients had been very understanding of the problem.

“Staff were brilliant.

“For two nights they thought of everyone they could and rang them up, asking if they had appointments in the next few weeks.

“My staff have been amazing.

“I can’t speak highly enough of them.”

Mr Cass, who also has salons in Lancaster, Preston and Morecambe, said that when he first started in salons, pen and paper appointment books were used and being aware of cybersecurity threats was very new to him.

“In 20 years I’ve never had it happen to me, but you never know,” he told The Westmorland Gazette.

“I want to warn businesses to back up because we hadn’t done and to make sure they’ve got adequate protection on their computers.

“For me now, I’ve bought my staff iPads to use so they’re not using the network system.

“If this had happened to a smaller business, it could have destroyed it.”

For the next couple of weeks, the Kendal salon will have a spare stylist on hand in case clients walk in with an appointment that was deleted from the system.