Thanks to rarestia for the urgent ping!!
Posted on 03/16/2016 9:29:48 AM PDT by rarestia
Thanks to rarestia for the urgent ping!!
If you want to make your site subscription-based, or prevent people with ad-blockers from accessing it, then that's fine. It's your property, after all.
But what's the rationale for forcing me to make my online experience unnecessarily burdensome and unpleasant?
A couple of years ago a family member got caught up in the cryptokeeper deal. He didn’t reach out to me until it was too late and I was unable to restore anything. I removed and replaced his hard drive, put the bad one in a static bag and stuck it in a drawer.
Almost two years later there was an article posted that the authors of that ransomware website had been caught and that they were publishing the keys to reclaim your stuff.
I was able to decrypt and restore 95% of that drive.
There’s an adage in life: if it’s free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
Most of us don’t pay to view articles on paywall news services, so they use advertising to try to make a profit. It costs a lot of money to run networking equipment, servers, and operating environments to present that content.
Advertising agencies pay huge sums of money to companies to provide targeted advertising to people on their sites. They use cookies to determine sites you’ve visited, products you’ve purchased, things you’ve searched for on Google, etc. They put all that information together to present a product to you that you have a high likelihood of clicking to look at.
The rationale is that they don’t care if it’s burdensome to you. Hell, look at Beck’s Blaze website. My script blocking and cookie blocking software goes absolutely bonkers when I visit that site, and without enabling at least some of the stuff, I don’t see much content at all. That’s poor use of advertising and abysmal functional maintenance of their site. Other sites like YouTube use forced, targeted ads in the videos to help the publisher of those videos make some coin. Burdensome? A little. Annoying? Oh yeah.
Bottom line: advertising is the only way that Internet content providers can make money. Having a product like AdBlockPlus makes it so that those sites are losing advertising revenue.
there’s no snark about it- I’m not a linux fanboy- I’ve simply made hte switch to linux only for browsing the Internet because of EXE files affecting computers- (and the fact that windows 10 is doing what it’s doing)- I use windows 10 still but do not allow it access to Internet- I believe ransomware has to be specifically written to infect linux systems, no?- And liek you said they would have3 to be browsing Internet with elevated privileges enacted and go through certain steps to be infected if I’m not mistaken?
I’m not all that up on these things- but I was under the impression that it’s much harder for linux to be infected (not impossible, but harder) whereas viruses and malware can be written for windows users to automatically infect?
I am very cautious, even though I no longer have high value professional files. Among other things, I keep separate backup files, and I alternate between two weekly backup drives. Most of my daily files are on thumb drives (with two of those), so I don’t risk much from ransomware.
I like your point that non-urgent files may be salvageable, eventually. The family photos don’t have to be accessed weekly, and they can be restored if the keys are eventually recovered.
“Cyber criminals snap up expired domains to serve malicious ads”
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-website-malware-idUSKCN0WI2DZ?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews
Security is important, of course, but say goodbye to free websites if you expect sites to go without ads. Ain't no free - websites cost money to run, especially content-based websites.
https://blog.malwarebytes.org/malvertising-2/2016/03/large-angler-malvertising-campaign-hits-top-publishers/
These companies have an obligation, IMO, to vet the outfits they use to put ads on their websites, and the ads that are put up by them.
Leaving aside the ransomware, I’ve seem a number of otherwise respectable sites hosting ads for some questionable companies. For example, ads for BeeZid, QuiBids, and similar “penny auction” outfits.
Anyway, they should be making it very clear to the companies who provide these ads that THEY need to properly vet the advertising they’re going to carry, or that they’ll be dropped otherwise. Those companies will probably claim that they weren’t aware of what they were providing, but all of them - the websites and the ad providers - can’t just keep kicking the can of responsibility for what they serve up down the road.
and the other reason i finally made the switch to linux- reluctantly at first- was because I got sick and tired of clicking on links you thought were safe, only to find out the site had been infected- I tried to mitigate that some by running things like McAfee site checker, and norton’s safe site (where they put a green check mark or red warning mark on each search result), but I was still hitting sites that were infected even though I ran these- and i don’t do much online that is risky really- all of my onlien activity is news, my photo sites, and research for things like computer problems- that’s it- email too- but that’s it- it was getting to the point though that it was becoming a hassle to use the Internet because of malware and viruses-
Believe me i miss IE (I don’t like firefox) but i don’t miss the constant warnings and begin redirected to infected sites, etc- Most viruses trojans and malware are made specifically for windows- Yes there are a few linux ones out there- and some day I might get stung by one, but the chances will be far less under linux and safe Internet practices than under windows and safe Internet practices- That’s the only reason i suggested people look into linux-
Anyone use their iPad or iPhone as their primary device?
[[These companies have an obligation, IMO, to vet the outfits they use to put ads on their websites, and the ads that are put up by them.]]
Exactly- every bit as much responsibility as a shop owner has to vet those he hires- IF a shop owner knowingly hires violent gang members, criminals, deviants etc, or doesn’t bother looking into those he hires, and customers are attacked- the owner should be held responsible along with the criminals-
What the web needs are more and more autoplay back ground videos. I was at hotair on an un-adaware computer and about 4 started at once. AWESOME.
I kept nagging him and eventually even gave him an external hard drive to back his crap up but he never used it (!). Fortunately he bough a newer laptop and I set the old one up as a web browsing only machine (no data).
That’s my approach - a dedicated machine that I can mess up and restore without worrying about loss of my stuff.
I manage ~1PB of networked storage supporting around 10k client workstations.
It’s been 2-3 cryptolocker infestations per week around here for the last six months.
I snapshot the file systems on my storage arrays twice a day. When some bonehead manages to lose access to their files it’s a simple matter of over-writing them with a previous version.
Because you just can’t fix stupid. Not even with duct tape.
[[Fortunately he bough a newer laptop and I set the old one up as a web browsing only machine (no data).
That’s my approach]]
Good strategy- also, you can buy a ‘disk duplicator’ for about $50 or so and make a raw one to one physical duplicate of the computer- that way if the comptuer gets a virus, just pop the new drive in (after duplicating it again to the infected one), and you’re up and running in minutes (as logn as it takes to disconnect the ifnected drive, and put new uninfected on in- I woudl actually buy three cheap used drives, and have three at once- that way there is no downtime waiting for the drives to duplicate- you will always have one with a clean install of windows on it ready to go, and you can duplicate the remaining good drive to hte bad one afterwards)
[[I snapshot the file systems on my storage arrays twice a day.]]
How do you do the snaopshots? I was usign a program called ‘RollBackRx’ which did system snapshots and was quite good- but i wasn’t sure if it would protect against ransom ware? It was supposed to work at a very low level, being able to roll back a system before the system boots- (I guess meaning you could choose a rollback point before you got infected)
It saved my hide many many times, but this new ransom ware crap I wasn’t sure it could handle-
I’ve been using Ghost for years so it’s 2nd hand. I accumulated a small stack of 80gig SATA drives so I have no (immediate) risk of running out of backup hardware.
Right now I’m working on a project where I’m running Mint in a VirtualBox window on a Win-7 host. I’m trying to see if I and 1.) infect the linux box and 2.) cross-contaminate the Windows host machine. There are no cross points except hardware (the VM resides on the host hard drive and they share a USB port).
Those sites are so shitty I normally leave within seconds.
Literally!
No content is THAT interesting
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.