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.
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.
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!
There is no easy way to prevent this in the short term - In fact, folks with responsible backup habits are more susceptible to ransomware than are the schlepps who are lucky to backup quarterly, as one is very likely to commit a backup before you know the files are encrypted, thus overwriting the files in your backup store... The fact that they left their USB HDD plugged in is almost incidental to the fact. These bugs will also infect any writeable network share too, so network backup, even cloud backup, is just as likely to be overwritten with encrypted files, all the more so if backup routines are often executed.
A ‘pull’ oriented (rather than ‘push’) backup initiated by a server pulling files from client machines to read-only shares would eliminate the chance of infection over LAN, but doesn’t do anything for overwriting with encrypted files from the client... But that is half the battle...
Creating a dated backup from the store before initiating a new backup would certainly help, but now you have the problem of giant datastores essentially without incremental differentiation...
It’s a tough nut for automated backup.
I too use and external hard drive, but always keep in disconnected when I am not directly using it. I also back up my photos in cloud storage and on flash drives kept in my bank safety deposit box. I also have my old photo negatives in the safety deposit box.