The two kinds of computer users
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Seems you have backups under control. The problem is not emails from scumbag entities, but more: Infected websites. I NEVER EVER open emails from untrusted sources, especially if it says it has an invoice attached. X| However, when browsing for info on the Internet: How do you know in advance that a particular link that came up in Google is infected? I refuse to cower in a safe little corner of the Internet for fear of infection. Because of a disciplined backup regime, I can recover from an infection in a minimum of time. (So far this year I had to do it three times!)
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
Well, my Interwebs use is pretty dull, compared to most people's. I haven't done much surfing for years (mainly because 85% of what you find by surfing is better left unfound), and I never click links that have emphatic adjectives in them. "This could cause me to have to do work that I don't want to do" is always in the back of my mind, so I always think twice before clicking almost anything. I think I'll get a T-shirt printed with "Curiosity Killed the Computer!" (and "No, I won't Fix it for You!" on the back).
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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One of our customers recently opened a link from an email from his internet provider. The link looked alright (formatted as provider.com/businessinvoice), but actually linked to some weird website from Italy. The email was signed by the manager products and marketing (because they send invoices, apparently). A quick Google even learned this guy wasn't director anymore, but who checks that (I'm surprised they even used an actual person's name). It was sent to jobs@company.com, because it's totally legit that the email address for job gets invoices. And it contained sentences like "To get more info a! bout...". WHY THE HELL DO PEOPLE OPEN THESE LINKS!? :~ In this case the result was CryptoLocker, booooooom! Mandatory Dilbert[^]
Visit my blog at Sander's bits - Writing the code you need. Or read my articles at my CodeProject profile.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. — Edsger W. Dijkstra
Regards, Sander
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They get email all the time has "VOICE MAIL MESSAGE FROM 5139756654 53sec" or randome numbers. Inside is voice mail message.zip In there becomes voice mail message.wav.exe :(
I remember years ago, when the Unix and Apple anti-Windows-Bitching Brigade (this was pre-Linux) were going on and on about one of the reasons Windows was cr@p was that it used file extensions, and files should be opened according to their content, not some stupid three-letter extension. Trying to explain to a moron that he's a moron was just as hard then as it is now.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I remember years ago, when the Unix and Apple anti-Windows-Bitching Brigade (this was pre-Linux) were going on and on about one of the reasons Windows was cr@p was that it used file extensions, and files should be opened according to their content, not some stupid three-letter extension. Trying to explain to a moron that he's a moron was just as hard then as it is now.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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They get email all the time has "VOICE MAIL MESSAGE FROM 5139756654 53sec" or randome numbers. Inside is voice mail message.zip In there becomes voice mail message.wav.exe :(
Well, don't leave us in excitement! What did the voice mails say!? ;p
Visit my blog at Sander's bits - Writing the code you need. Or read my articles at my CodeProject profile.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. — Edsger W. Dijkstra
Regards, Sander
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I took an image of my C drive yesterday after the news of the ransomware emails spreading through the UK press.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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No, I do take images but they could be done more regularly. I checked my spreadsheet detailing which drives get imaged and when they were last imaged. My C drive was last imaged in November last year so I thought it would be a very good idea to create another image.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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There are 2 kinds of computer users in the world: Those who regularly backup data and systems images, and those who wish to gawd they did! :)
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
Ransomeware got into the place I work. The IT server group got called in and spent the night. In the morning, almost everything was restored from the backups.* I was unaffected: I (and the other developers) have a box and were not in the forest when the fire broke out. I've had fear of attack since the 80's. For the hell of it, I keep my (home) NAS offline much of the time. Sounds crazy, but it's become storage central (do they call that a personal cloud these days). All goodies survived super storm Sandy on it's raid-1 drives, and I only lost the computers. Much easier to replace. Except for the every-increasing cost of good aluminum foil, paranoia has its perks.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
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Do you pay a "wu mao" or two? Two upvotes for that looks very much like sock-puppetry, given that the person you replied to didn't get an upvote for actually saying what you only gave a thumbs-up to.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Ransomeware got into the place I work. The IT server group got called in and spent the night. In the morning, almost everything was restored from the backups.* I was unaffected: I (and the other developers) have a box and were not in the forest when the fire broke out. I've had fear of attack since the 80's. For the hell of it, I keep my (home) NAS offline much of the time. Sounds crazy, but it's become storage central (do they call that a personal cloud these days). All goodies survived super storm Sandy on it's raid-1 drives, and I only lost the computers. Much easier to replace. Except for the every-increasing cost of good aluminum foil, paranoia has its perks.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
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No, I do take images but they could be done more regularly. I checked my spreadsheet detailing which drives get imaged and when they were last imaged. My C drive was last imaged in November last year so I thought it would be a very good idea to create another image.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
-
Do you pay a "wu mao" or two? Two upvotes for that looks very much like sock-puppetry, given that the person you replied to didn't get an upvote for actually saying what you only gave a thumbs-up to.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Do you pay a "wu mao" or two? Two upvotes for that looks very much like sock-puppetry, given that the person you replied to didn't get an upvote for actually saying what you only gave a thumbs-up to.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Kidding, right? My back-up routine falls under the military category "Mutual Support", with files flying in every direction, from every machine to every machine, in perfectly-timed relays. It's better planned than the bus services in most cities. I could lose two-thirds of the machines on my network without losing a file, and would only lose any important files if all the devices failed at the same time as the Internet was switched off forever. But I'm still not so stupid as to open e-mails from people I don't know, and will only open attachments to e-mails if the person has told me in advance (through a medium other than e-mail) that he's sending me an e-mail with an attachment.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Some of the Rasnsomware also encrypts connected and network devices too. Like Cloud Backups.
Oh Golly! Do you mean that I'm going to have to stop opening attachments in e-mails from people I don't know, and stop clicking every link I see?!? How awful!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I've been wondering about those upvotes myself? I've had nothing to do with it. It's not the first time I see phantom upvotes. :)
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
... Aaaand even that gets an upvote.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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... Aaaand even that gets an upvote.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Oh Golly! Do you mean that I'm going to have to stop opening attachments in e-mails from people I don't know, and stop clicking every link I see?!? How awful!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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November? :-) I get annoyed at myself when the time I last did a backup gets counted in weeks.
I know - my life in the past year has been kind of busy. I store the vast majority of my data on a cloud server with the ability to restore at any point in time(dropbox and so far it's pretty cheap too). So the only real issue is my OS disk being imaged - if something did happen it would be a case of restoring the image and Windows updates, so while November isn't great, it's not a huge problem for a personal non-production environment machine.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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There are 2 kinds of computer users in the world: Those who regularly backup data and systems images, and those who wish to gawd they did! :)
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
Backups are a definite must ... and certainly can help with ransomware. But they sure as elephant don't even come close to being a silver bullet. So I might be tempted to say you get 2 sub-kinds of the first kind: - Those who know that a good backup routine is only a brick in the wall. - Those who think having an "awesome" backup routine is all they need. Personally I start off by stating: I am the weak link. I need to make sure I don't do stupid things like clicking on just any old thing, or opening mails from doggy sources. Next I take the line that a backup is blind ... if you don't catch things like ransomware soon enough, your backup is simply duplicating the ransomware spreading it further. So do tests on your data before and after backups, i.e. what anti-viruses "should" be doing but rarely actually "do". And finally understand that no lock is pick-proof, no medicine works for all illnesses - same way all firewalls / AVs / etc. are just attempts to keep bad things out. And fixes and patches are just there to try and remove those bad things once they HAVE TAKEN HOLD. At which time your latest backup is most probably also infected and would help very little when you try to restore it.
