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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.
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?
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.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
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.