Damn! It's a classic pump and dump hehe.
... what can be done about this ?
I'm not sure what you are really asking. Were you unable to sell during the pump or before it went down the gutter? It looks like you have no other option but to wait if you are still holding those tokens and forget for a while. That is only applicable if you think the team didn't sell their tokens for an exit scam.
How can I protect the coin from Pumps
You would want your coin to pump. What you should protect it from is massive dumps like that.
The dump happened by an early buy and it pumped again the early buyer was slowly draining all the new buyers. it was some kind of bot I think, this is what the entire chart looks like.