Ransomware help

[ubuysa]

I came across this on the BBC news website this morning https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49096991 and for anyone who has been infected the related website (https://www.nomoreransom.org/) looks like it might be useful. It's backed by the Europol Cybercrime Agency and the Dutch police...

 

[de4life]

The golden rule for me is back up, back up, back up. I've got 3 seperate external HDD's with my important stuff backed up onto them. Whilst some victims of ransomware will be helped by websites like that, criminals are always finding new ways to thwart the authorities. My dad's laptop somehow ended up with ransomware last year, but as he had followed my advice and backed up all of his important stuff to an external HDD, I just needed to format the drive, reinstall windows and he was good to go.

 

[Stephen M]

Same here, I keep two back ups of everything, can seem a bit OTT but drives can fail at any time even with surge protectors and stuff like that so it is worth being a bit over-cautious.

 

[de4life]

I've had a lot of people tell me "I don't need an external hard drive to back up onto, all of my stuff gets backed up onto the cloud anyway!"

Yeah, great, unless the ransomware spreads to the cloud as well - as it often does - then that backup solution becomes irrelevent. Over the years I've simply kept an eye out for decent prices on external HDD's and picked one up every so often. Completely disconnected from the internet and stored safely (and ideally seperately if you have more than one), there's no downside.

 

[ubuysa]

I also backup everything on a schedule every night to an external HDD. However, if you have the HDD permanently connected then ransomware will encrypt that too. My backup drive is on a USB controlled mains switch and I have a scheduled task that powers the external drive on, starts the backups, and then powers the external drive off. My backup drive is thus only vulnerable during the backup runs. I have also considered having the scheduled task stop all Internet activity for the duration of the backup, and it could easily be done, but I've not yet felt the need. My Internet security system (Comodo) automatically sandboxes any process it doesn't recognise so it would be hard for ransomware to infect me in any case.

My reason for posting that was just in case it helps anyone else.

 

[peter247]

My way is with a NAS and a couple of external hard drives.
The advantage of using a NAS is versioning where it just add the bits which have changed , so if someone encrypted all my file all I would do is pick a previous version.
I also backup all my computers each day fully , and backup my NAS to a external drive.
BUT found "if everything can go wrong, it will" my last NAS just died without warning that why I also backup to external drives, which when I go on holiday I give a drive to the next door neighbour.

 

[phitol]

I back up to NAS, but also critical things (documents, photo's and video's etc) I auto backup from the NAS to the cloud on a service that stores versions of files, so theoretically even if my NAS got compromised and the cloud backup was compromised I could restore to the day before version of all files..

 

[de4life]

At the end of the day as long as you're backing up your important files safely and remotely then getting a ransomeware virus would be more of an irritation than a total disaster (as a personal user, obviously a bit different if you're a business but the same principle applies). As a personal user the vast majority of people can be securely backed up for less than £100 plus a little time setting everything up. It also safeguards you against a drive that suddenly fails and pretty much any form of data corruption. Unfortunately most people tend to learn this lesson the hard way and that's why Data Recovery companies exist!

 

[SpyderTracks]

Most half decent cloud storage have protections against ransomware attacks anyway and would prevent the data being lost.

I haven't backed anything up other than to cloud for about 10 years now, just no need. I've had to restore a few times in that period with failed disks etc and never had an issue.

 

[de4life]

Yeah, protected cloud storage is a totally viable backup option as well. Most people tend to go for the free or cheap cloud storage options though, which often don't tend to come with the security needed to ensure viruses are kept out.