PSA: Make your PC, Mac and phone backups folks

[PedroDaGr8]

Just a quick PSA reminder to backup your computer and phone to an external drive and/or online service! Ransomware recently has been on the rise. Ransomware works by basically encrypting all of your documents and photos. More or less anything of actual value on your computer. An acquaintance of mine just got hit by this. If you don't have a backup your only option is to pay the ransom (usually several hundred dollars) to the malware author and hope that they send you the key to unlock all of your files. More importantly, they have been targeting businesses (namely medical offices right now) and charging higher ransoms to retrieve the data. These attacks are becoming much more directly targeted via spear phishing, they use publicly available data to target emails (which include your real name, possibly your phone number, etc.) to try to get you to open the attachment in the email (might be a pdf, doc, doxc, xls, xlsx, etc.). If you don't have regular, well maintained backups, you might be out thousands of dollars to recover your business data as well. This is not limited to PCs either, ransomware has begun appearing on Apple computers as well.

Also, at the same time, backup your phones. I can't count the number of ppl that I have known lose large amounts of important data because they didn't backup their phones properly or things like the contacts backup failed.

[CitizenBBN]

Sound advice Pedro. I'd like to get these hackers in a room for 10 minutes with no laws and a crowbar. I can't stand thieves, in person or virtual. I include malicious hacking without a profit in that group as well, just as I include vandals. They cost money and cause damage, that's theft.

That reminds me to go make sure the backups on the mail server are working.

[badrose]

Malwarebytes has a free beta anti-ransomware you can download.

[PedroDaGr8]

Malwarebytes has a free beta anti-ransomware you can download.

Thanks for the heads up, I hadn't seen that tool. I wonder how it will interact with software that intentionally encrypts stuff as part of the a "valid" function such as obscuring banking information or DRM. Still, good to see that they are trying becuase this ransomware is nasty stuff.

[bigsky]

Right now the bad guys are winning. There isnt any magic protection via apple, other than right now there is less money in it.