fred avolio's musings

“Woman targeted by web hackers,” is the headline of this BBC News article. It talks about someone who was victim to “new phenomenon, known as Ransomware.”

The first thing I thought of? That the BBC won’t print “Disk crash causes Greater Manchester woman to lose all files.” Yet a solution to this old problem would provide a solution to this “new” one: Every user should have an easy way and an accessible place for backing up.

So, this is the current scheme on my home network: The PCs use Allsync®, backing up to a Linux server. On my PowerBook, I use Sync.

Now, I have to start periodically saving that backed up data from my Linux system to DVD-Rs. Hmmmm. Or, I suppose, I should nightly copy this out to one of my Internet-based servers. Duh. Should’ve thought of that before! Rsync it! Yes!! I’m not worried about Ransomware. But, a fire would do even more damage to the data.

The article closes with, “A Greater Manchester Police spokesman said: ‘Our High Tech Crime Unit is aware of this new type of crime and incidents of this kind could increase in future.'”

To which I say,

“Extraordinary crimes against the people and the State have to be avenged by agents extraordinary. Two such people are John Steed, top professional, and his partner Emma Peel, talented amateur—otherwise known as The Avengers.

No. Really, Helen should’ve just backed up her data periodically. And not clicked on that link.