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93% Of Phishing Emails Are Now Ransomware (csoonline.com)
According to the latest data from security firm PhishMe, 93% of all phishing emails as of the end of March contained encryption ransomware. The numbers underscore a growing trend in the security space as ransomware instances in phishing emails grew up by 56% since December last year. From a report: The anti-phishing vendor also counted the number of different variants of phishing emails that it saw. Ransomware accounted for 51 percent of all variants in March, up from just 29 percent in February and 15 percent in January. The skyrocketing growth is due to that fact that ransomware is getting easier and easier to send and that it offers a quick and easy return on investment. Other types of cyberattacks typically take more work to monetize. Stolen credit card numbers have to be sold and used before the cards are canceled, for example. Identity theft takes even more of a time commitment.
The legal system hasn't caught up with them.
It should be a capital penalty on some of those crimes, especially when it comes to ID theft for profit.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Just click on the following embedded link:
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I'm scared of my mother calling me one day telling me "I've lost every picture from all my life and a guy is asking me $10K to recover them".
By that point it will be late to tell her "shouldn't have been storing them in a disk permanently attached to your windows laptop".
But I don't know how to stop her. I won't convince her to use linux. I won't manage to teach her not to execute random crap once per year.
Should I trust hard drives to store data for decades?
Our suggestion is that they make backups of their valuable data... and since that may not be something they are confident/knowledgable enough to do on their own, if you want to make sure it gets done, you may need to set it up (and occasionally check up on it) yourself.
On Mac, setting up a Time Machine backup drive is pretty trivial to do. For Windows, similar solutions exist. For a laptop, there are solutions that back up data via WiFi, if plugging in an external drive is too much bother. In either case, if you want to be completely safe, you may want to swap out the backup drive with a spare every month or so, to avoid the possibility that the ransomware finds a way to encrypt both the computer's primary drive and its connected backup drive.
Do all that, and the likelihood is that a ransomware attack will require only a reformat and reinstall, followed by a recovery from the latest backup, and only a few hours' worth of data will be lost.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
One of the problems is jurisdiction. When the police were investigating my identity being stolen (used to open a credit card in my name, not related to phishing/ransomware), they told me that they weren't highly motivated to put in a lot of effort because they'd likely have to hand the case to another department to make the arrest. In their minds, they were asking why do the work when someone else would get the collar. Then there are international cases where the victim is in the US but the phisher is in Ukraine or some other country out of the reach of normal US law enforcement. As long as the phisher doesn't hit too big of a target (e.g. a major US government agency or Fortune 500 company), they will likely fly under the radar of law enforcement and/or pleas to local law enforcement will be made but they will not result in arrests (either due to corruption or lack of interest in pursuing these cases due to the victims being from another country).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
VERSIONED BACKUPS! VERSIONED BACKUPS! VERSIONED BACKUPS! Automated, off-site, and with rollback. Hell, carbonite can do this for her.
Silence is a state of mime.
we cant put as much effort into catching these fraudsters as we put into catching underwear bombers.
The bombers come to you, all you have to do is grab their junk.
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What you you suggest? Everyone one OSx so it becomes the biggest target base so the majority of malware is written for it then we can say that's what you get for using a mac?
Wanna buy a shirt?
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I'm scared of my mother calling me one day telling me "I've lost every picture from all my life and a guy is asking me $10K to recover them".
By that point it will be late to tell her "shouldn't have been storing them in a disk permanently attached to your windows laptop".
But I don't know how to stop her. I won't convince her to use linux. I won't manage to teach her not to execute random crap once per year.
Should I trust hard drives to store data for decades?
Just go ahead and delete it all now, that way no harm can come to the files.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Windows has nothing to do with the problem other than being the prevalent OS. Windows had UAC which should help prevent these types of issues but rabsomeware operates on the user's directories so it has permission to modify files. Mac OSx would allow the same. Linux also... You don't need root to house up a user's files.
The basic problem is that you can't fix stupid.
Seriously?
If anything, it would be easier to encrypt files in Linux because the attackers don't need to bring all the tools with them.
If everyone running Windows today switched to Linux, you can bet that the malware people would rejoice since the very utilitarian nature of Linux would then be working in their favor.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
If the virus will be able to penetrate their [Windows] system, they can quickly gain access to important parts of the system. On the other hand, in Linux, they have a lower access rights, and, theoretically, the virus can only access local files and folders, the system will remain safe.
Data is more imortant than the system - the system can be restored. We are talking about data encryption here.