Getting sorted before I get cryptoed
I caught up with a mate from the old days last week. We shared a flat together for about 5 or 6 years and have been mates ever since, even after he moved away, got married, moved again, and again. It was good to catch up and see him looking well and doing well.
He works in IT support and he was telling me about some of the bulk work he has to deal with in the large town / small city (depending on how you calculate these things) he lives in. It’s not a place known for its tech industry. It is known for its high number of pensioners though. Yes, it’s where a lot of people go to retire. So not somewhere you’d expect a lot of cyber attacks.
And yet – he said he is dealing with one or two cases each week of hard drives being encrypted and being held for ransom. That’s a surprising high number for a place you’d expect not to be a high value target.
He said the main avenues for getting in and launching the attack is the Remote Desktop Protocol, and brute force attacks (i.e. trojans). Once your drive is encrypted the hacker demands payment (in Bitcoin) for the key to unlock your files. My friend reported a couple of cases where money was paid and the files were unlocked, but more people just lost their money as well as their files.
Forewarned is forearmed.
I bought a 4 terabyte removable drive yesterday, and I am currently copying and consolidating all my data (and my wife’s data) from all the other various internal and external drives onto a single drive. Once that is done this drive will be physically disconnected from my pc. Each week I’ll do an incremental backup of the files and my pc to the drive.
I have another old high capacity drive that I’ll copy all of the important files onto – like wedding photos, and I’ll take that drive up to my parent’s place to sit in my dad’s drawer of random crap, just in case I lose everything down here. It won’t have my latest data, but it will have all of the important stuff.
Why not just back up to the cloud?
Think about it. When a file changes on your PC, it gets synced to your cloud account. If it gets encrypted on your PC, that’s a change, so the encrypted file is copied up and the copy on the cloud server is overwritten. Unless you are explicitly paying for archival incremental backups you have no way of restoring the file without the encryption key.
External hard drives are pretty cheap and reliable these days, so this is a much more robust way of beating the hackers. If my machine gets so badly messed up and even re-installing Windows doesn’t return control of it to me, then I can buy a new machine, plug in the external drive, and carry on with my life. The hacker gets nothing and I get a brand new machine. It cost a bit of money sure, but I was due for an upgrade anyhow…
The call to action
The best way to defeat the hackers is to secure your machine, your network, everything. And then back everything up regularly and store it so that nothing can damage it, and no-one can access it. The best time to do this is before you get hacked, or your hard drive fails, or there is a fire, flood, earthquake, burglary. Take the time now to protect your future self, and when things inevitably go wrong, you’ll be very grateful that you did.
(3 more hours left of the copy process to go. I have a lot of very large files!)
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