Ransomware?

Obnoxious stuff. It hits our users on a regular basis. I've dealt personally with 7 people this year with their data locked down.

So my poor mother's computer is being held hostage and they may not be able to get her stuff back. :(

That happened to one of my team members last year. Ugh. I would not expect that situation to resolve well.

Occasionally I still get one on paper, and now I think that's weird!

Totally.

Ransomware?

Apparently.

So what should she have done? And how do you protect yourself?

From what I understand there is a toolkit that can unencrypt some cases of ransomware. Apparently some, but not all, of these guys (or gals I suppose, let's just go with scum). Anyhow some of the scum that make ransomware aren't great with encryption and simply used random values to generate keys. Since it goes on to encrypt files that creates timestamps on the files and the default random value seed is often the current time, it's possible to guess the keys from the time when the encryption started.

This is why you should use an entropy store instead of just generating a random number.

My work computer got infected with ransomware a year ago, despite having antivirus software.

The best thing to do is to have an automatic backup so if your computer is infected you can nuke it from orbit and reinstall everything.

So what should she have done? And how do you protect yourself?

Always back up stuff you need with software than can restore earlier versions and not just the latest version. Apply OS updates and use updated anti-malware software. Anti-malware software isn't so important on Mac and Linux though.

Here's a link to some decryptors if your mom is lucky enough to have gotten an infection from scum who aren't good at encryption.

[link]

She brought it to Best Buy to fix, I guess, so we'll see what they can come up with, but I'm sure she has no backups.

Note to self: Back up!

Health~ma, Matt!

I am amazed that ransomware is an issue for, like, ordinary people. I mean, of course it could be, but how weird that it is!

I love the term entropy store. I feel like I would be an excellent manager of a B&M entropy store.

IJWTS that I am having a really hard time not saying "fuck off" out loud to emails/alerts/notifications/whatever that are irritating me now that I am back from vacation. So far I have kept it under my breath, but I really need to make that an in-my-head-only thing, I think.

Which reminds me, I need to make backups.

One thing that works is to make copies of your data and put it into non-default folders. Ransomware hits my company's customers by tracking into the default data path and dropping bombs into the stored data. I guess it checks to see which programs are used most often, then checks configuration to find where the data is likely to be.