Posted on 03/11/2015 10:42:15 AM PDT by rickmichaels
Theresa and Billy Niedermayer paid an $800 ransom to get precious family photos of their three young boys back from cybercriminals.
Their home computer had been seized by one of the more malicious malware programs spreading fast around the world.
Ransomware takes computer files hostage. Cybercriminals target photos, videos, spreadsheets, documents, slide presentations — anything that someone will pay to recover. The initial infection takes seconds.
In some cases, the malicious software encrypts the files so their owners can no longer read them. The data isn't compromised or removed, just locked down and inaccessible.
Try to access them and a ransom demand appears. Typically, cybercriminals demand upward of $500 US, paid in the untraceable cybercurrency bitcoins.
Billy and Theresa Niedermayer run a home business programming and selling Android TV boxes, but their tech background didn't stop them from falling victim.
They had backed up their data on an external hard drive, but kept it plugged in to the computer, allowing it to become infected along with the rest of the computer.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbc.ca ...
precious family photos of their three young boys
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I bet the three precious boys had a hand in causing this event.
Unreal. I guess that’s one way to make money in photography these days. I will stick to honest stock video which is a hobby more than anything. Now if some the 4K would sell....
Buy an external drive, save all of your precious files, and store the drive in a safe, only to be used in emergencies.
If it was really important to them, they would have backed it up.
They did back it up. Did you read the excerpt? They left the backup drive attached to the computer so it got infected as well.
Boot your computer with Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 and clean out Ransomware ,D’oh
What a low and dirty thing to do to people.
This may place renewed interest in upcoming Scrap Booking Classes. Back to the future, time to go back to keeping physical photos and heirlooms again. Do not put all your eggs into one digital basket!
backup early and often and this becomes much less of a hassle
My daughter routinely loses all of her files. I bought her an external drive and showed her how to do backups.
She still loses stuff, because she only does backups annually.
Some day she will learn.
Burning discs is another. I admit that I have countless burned disc in storage and doubt that I have looked at hardly any of them.
Beware, discs can deteriorate over time.
I went through similar with my wife. She got a Carbonite subscription.
That’s not a backup. That’s an attached drive. That’s why it got infected.
A backup is not something attached to your computer.
I backup my wife’s laptop with my machine over the network.
Main source of all Ransomware is pron.
Beware of pron.
How is “pron” pronounced?
So the servers in the hospital cafeteria have a medical background?
This happened to my brother’s laptop. The folks in this article were afflicted by CryptoWall but my brother was hit by Cryptolocker - they are probably very similar.
My brother didn’t say anything until the 72-hour grace period expired so there was nothing that could be done - all of his stuff (documents, pictures, music, etc) were locked by encryption.
I tried everything I knew or could find on the web but no luck. I gave him a new hard drive and rebuilt his system - without data - and put his old drive in a drawer.
A couple of months ago I read an article that said that the Cryptolocker guys had been captured and claimed that it was possible to obtain the code to decrypt the files. I checked out the link and submitted a sample locked document. They sent me back a key and was able to reclaim better than 95% of his stuff.
Needless to say he was overjoyed to get his stuff back!
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