Tuesday’s massive ransomware outbreak was, in fact, something much worse

ArsTechnica ^ | 6/29/2017 | DAN GOODIN

[Lockbox]

Now referred to as Hillaryware.

[Tunehead54]

"I remember looking in awe at a 1GB drive. "

---

I remember paying $1200 for a 10 Megabyte hard drive in my new $8000 Columbia PC ~1981 ... 2 half height 360K floppies, dual processors (Z80/8088) in case IBM/Micro$oft failed.

That included a C.Itoh dot matrix printer, the size of a small car and a 1200 baud modem and 12" Color Monitor. Now a 64GB thumb drive is $16.00 with 2 day free delivery. Sheesh. Still give me more storage or give me death! - Too much trouble to wade through all the duplicates ... ;-)

[Dr. Sivana]

Important data should always be backed up and kept offline.

Enterprise organizations are backing up constantly, so the backup storage has to be kept online. Even with these backups, organizations like airlines, banks, etc. can be crippled if they have to go to backups that are not up to the minute. Worse, some of these malware will lay hidden for a while (remember Michelangelo?) and then the backups themselves may also be infected.

[Blennos]

Seagate drives are not really reliable. Might have some convenient features, but they tend to die sooner than I expected. If you want them for purely backup purpose, Japanese drives could be better choices. They are purely external storage devices, not trying to be close substitutes for internal hard drives, which have to handle constant data transfer. My experience shows that they are more durable. I used to use Seagate but switched to Toshiba. So far they are doing well.

I agree about Seagate. But I have never had a failure in many years using the higher-end WD drives. They are a little more expensive but well worth the outlay.

[Ancesthntr]

Interesting plot line. FYI, we cooperated with the mafia during World War II to keep out German spies and to get information regarding Italy prior to a couple of the landings there.

With regard to those guys, at least it is quite simple to understand their motivations, and to deal with them accordingly.

[TigerLikesRooster]

I have not used WD drives. I looked at the test statistics, and it seems that the results are mixed. Maybe it is different for the high end models.

[RinaseaofDs]

Friend of mine works for MSFT cybersecurity. It’s an NSA tool and the patch to fix it was released 5 months ago. The folks hit decided not to patch.

This was avoidable, twice.

[commish]

There is no “offline”, once you’ve gone to the cloud. So all eyes are on the cloud, I would presume.

There is no cloud, it is just somebody else's computer.

[Strac6]

Smart move

[TexasGunLover]

There is no “offline”, once you’ve gone to the cloud. So all eyes are on the cloud, I would presume.

That is not correct. You can easily, and most corporations do, keep offline backups even of "cloud" implementations.

[TexasGunLover]

This was avoidable, twice.

Exactly.

[Little Ray]

And people who release malware like this should simply be hunted down and killed.
Don’t like extra-legal punishment, but courts would never punish these people as they deserve.

[Vermont Lt]

Sometimes it is the only way to move information quickly and conveniently.

For example, I was a professional photographer specializing in sports. There were be times when I was shooting for a college on the other side of the country. I used cloud storage so that the Sports Information guys at the college could log onto a remote sever and download their photos as soon as they were uploaded.

The last time I shot a basketall tournament, I was shooting on the floor, editing in the camera, transmitting the image to a PC onsite, which was uploading to the cloud every time a new image hit the folder.

There were literally photos on their twitter page within a minute of the play.

It was scary “real time” stuff. And if I was more adept, I should have just sent the highlight photos to the twitter feed and skip the middle parts.

So, that is an example of how the cloud has enhanced my life. There are million of other examples.

[Vermont Lt]

I had four Drobo four drive network drives. I started out with 1TB drives. The entire thing was up to 16 bays of 4 TB drives.

I was backing up stuff at least twice.

What I did not do was a good job of indexing individual files. Finding an event is a task and a half now.

I upgraded from Seagate to WD drives because the SGs were burning up. I never lost data, but I hated tossing those drives away.

[Mr. K]

Anyone who does this should become prime target #1 for the entire planet, and hunted down and summarily executed.

It will teach a lesson for the others.

Anyone who SPOTS a vulnerability and reports it, should get a huge reward.

This completely changes the motivation to find and act on them.

[Mr. K]

Yeah, could be...

[Mr. K]

Anyone who bases their business on “the cloud” deserves everything that happens to them.

(and I am a software engineer FOR A LIVING)

There are valid and fantastic uses for “the cloud” but relying on it to store your information without physical LOCAL backup is just plain dumb.

[apocalypto]

for later

[AMiller]

To solve your indexing problem, look for a free program named Cathy. It will build an index of all of your drives that is searchable. Since the index is on your hard drive, you can index a removable drive, remove it and still have it included in the index. I have about 20 or so off line drives that I have in my index.

[AppyPappy]

You cannot destroy data if it has been backed up. If you don’t back it up, you don’t care about it.