Serious viral threat.

[Phyphor]

by name of Cryptolocker.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/New-File-Encrypting-Ransomware-CryptoLocker-Targets-Organizations-384790.shtml

Be aware that this is one nasty piece of work.  As I've said before BACK YOUR *expletive deleted*it UP.

That doesn't mean copy it to an always connected share or external drive, it means make sure it's safely copied and either non-writable (say, DVDs or Blu-Ray Rs. ) or detached from your PC, since this thing seems to be able to hit anything you have write permissions to.

Many people are reporting that paying the ransom succeeds, but others have had issues.  Know this: If this thing is removed while your files are encrypted, you're probably screwed (unless you reinfect, and even then, no guarantees. )

God, they need to have the death penalty for people like this. 

[Ben]

While I do weekly backups to a connected HD, I've pretty much consolidated my "critical" files into four directories and one TrueCrypt container, which I twice a year write to DVD. I keep one copy in the safe here and the other copy in my gun safe at my folks' place.

The files I deem critical are not all that large. While I have always had problems "simplifying my life" as far as not having so much crap in the physical world, I learned a while back to identify and reduce what I consider critical in the data world. Partly from having a couple of incidents in the past where I lost what I thought was important stuff that really, turned out not to be so important. It's easy to get to a point where you think every bit of data you own is important, but it's not.

I bet 99.9% of home computer users could not exceed the capacity of a DVD for their truly important files. Certainly businesses could be another story.

[vaskidmark]

....

I bet 99.9% of home computer users could not exceed the capacity of a DVD for their truly important files. Certainly businesses could be another story.

I will not endanger my porn stash - ever!

stay safe.

[AZRedhawk44]

I bet 99.9% of home computer users could not exceed the capacity of a DVD for their truly important files. Certainly businesses could be another story.

I have a pretty sizeable software archive that is a partial mirror of the MSDN library, in the form of several dozen ISO files.  I could re-download them again, but it's hundreds of gigs and would take quite the time investment to do it.  Granted, some of it harkens back to 2000-era software and is fading in utility.

Also about 750GB-1TB of ripped DVD titles that took weeks to convert to digital that would make me tear my hair out if I had to do it all again.  But I could.

Aside from that, my actual data of value is probably only about 2GB.

[AZRedhawk44]

Phyphor:  Thanks for the link.  I'm using it to scare the bejeezus out of my boss.  He's been a slackarse about budgeting for backup software and equipment, and our current backup solution consists of 3 USB drives connected to our core file server on a rotating basis, one at a time.  Any offline backup we have is 1-2 weeks old.

I've been pushing for a tape system with remote agents on all our other servers, a backup suite that can do differentials as well as properly capture remote virtual machines, as well as rotating offsite storage with Iron Mountain.

An ejected tape still sitting in the robotic library is still "offline" to any virus that isn't capable of defeating antivirus software on the backup server and knowing how to operate the library, making our data loss window considerably smaller.

This should help light a fire under him to take backups more seriously.

[Ben]

Also about 750GB-1TB of ripped DVD titles that took weeks to convert to digital that would make me tear my hair out if I had to do it all again.  But I could.

Certainly. I have gigs and gigs of data I would be cussing up a storm about if I had to lose and reacquire it, but it's not critical data, like insurance photos of my possessions, scans of important documents, etc. Even those I could recreate for the most part if given time, but are probably time sensitive docujments should I need them.

I first learned to live with data loss at work, when some years ago the gov, which would not allow me to archive my emails on my physical machine, lost tons of my emails and attachments that were archived on my server folders on some machine back in DC. They had their super double secret probation backups on some other machine, but I was given the excuse that it would be to expensive to get non-critical data of that machine. I had all sorts of stuff filed and referenced there and was pulling my hair out on how I would be able to do my job with the loss of those data. After a couple of months, it turned from "how will I ever go on" to, "woulda been nice to have, but oh well."...

It's interesting how some things in the digital age we think we can't do without end up not really mattering that much in the greater scheme of things.

[Sindawe]

Lovely, just freaking lovely.

I think I need a new career.  I don't want to deal with this kind of stuff if it some damn users PC in the workplace.