So I went down to the bitcoin ATM today...

[AndrewWilliams]

To combat this, an organization should start offering rewards for tips on crimes or finding lost children.

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1714853716

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[Kluge]

To combat this, an organization should start offering rewards for tips on crimes or finding lost children.

We should just do it ourselves. A few mid-20 male neckbeards on the Internet offering people money to tell them where particular children are, and we'll use Bitcoin.

[AndrewWilliams]

To combat this, an organization should start offering rewards for tips on crimes or finding lost children.

We should just do it ourselves. A few mid-20 male neckbeards on the Internet offering people money to tell them where particular children are, and we'll use Bitcoin.

Hmmmmm.... not the picture I was trying to paint.   

[btcfre@k]

well thats a story..poor old woman...these hackers spend their time to discredit bitcoin

[Gabi]

A woman who can't be bothered to backup her epic important things 

[TObject]

A woman who can't be bothered to backup her epic important things 

Part of the problem, people used to backup to a tape drive and take the tapes off-line; these days most everyone is backing up to hard-drives or storage that stays connected. So, the virus encrypts your backups.

So far the reports are that the virus encrypts only drives that have a letter assigned, so if you backup to a UNC share or a partition that have no letter assigned, your backups should be safe, for now. But there is nothing that prevents a next version of the virus to get to those.

As such, not only do you need to backup, you also need to devise a way of taking the backups offline.

[mrefish]

3-2-1

-Three copies
-On Two different media (like hard drive and DVD)
-One copy offsite (like to a friend or in the cloud)

[PrintMule]

A woman who can't be bothered to backup her epic important things 

Part of the problem, people used to backup to a tape drive and take the tapes off-line; these days most everyone is backing up to hard-drives or storage that stays connected. So, the virus encrypts your backups.

So far the reports are that the virus encrypts only drives that have a letter assigned, so if you backup to a UNC share or a partition that have no letter assigned, your backups should be safe, for now. But there is nothing that prevents a next version of the virus to get to those.

As such, not only do you need to backup, you also need to devise a way of taking the backups offline.

Hear hear. With the current sizes of your typical photos and videos - you would need a helluva lot of blank writable media. But what about external HDD's? There's your offline backup, for a really cheap GB/$ ratio. Me myself would not care if someone encrypted my info, I can always make new. There are some important personal archives with message archives, some photos, tons of bookmarks, creative stuff like lyrics and art, but I'm tempted to delete that stuff myself on a daily basis.

And in the end - paying 300$ for a valuable lesson is not as bad as having your laptop completely stolen or something.

[markyminer]

As such, not only do you need to backup, you also need to devise a way of taking the backups offline.

Ummm, this is simple beyond belief. 12 months ago I end ed up with a spare 1GB HDD trying a few types od drives to replace a failed HDD on a UK Sky PVR box. Rather than return it I wiped it and ordered a £15 nice blue HDD cady that came with it's own 5v power supply and a on/off switch at the back.

As I have now switched to a 128gb SSD drive with WIn7 64 I use my old 750GB vista drive as backup and mainly games storage. But I moved all the huge folders of photos, excel and word docs etc onto the new USB Caddy HDD.

Now as day to day I hardly need to look at these files and being a skinflint with a few ASIC mining rigs sucking electricity guess what, 95% of the time the power stich on that HDD caddy is "off". I only switch it on when I need it and it takes seconds for Windows to see it and give access.

Would be now sweat to make a second HDD caddy to make a weekly clone backup of the whole system and then switch it off when it's finished.

If cryptolocker got me, which is unlikely because I never open anything from anyone I don't know, and ask WTF is I get weird emails with attachments from those I do, then I would just reformat the HDD and restore the clone and carry one.

Lazyness and lack of IT awareness is the issue here. And i'm 45. By the time I retire the world will be a lot more IT savvy.

M