I wrote this in another thread, but it was all the way at the bottom and this is so important, I copied it and threw it back up here so it would have a better chance of being seen.
I think there may be some confusion as exactly what "ransomware" is.
I've gotten emails that say "I have video of you watching porn and if you don't pay some money I'll release it to your friends and family." These can be safely ignored. And, these are not ransomware.
Ransomware actually goes through your entire hard drive and "encrypts" each of your irreplaceable files. It then renames the file from, say, "MyPreciousBook.docx" to "MyPreciousBook.docx.r239f9if4". At that point, the file is useless. And, the encryption is so good that only very rarely can it be decrypted without the terrorist's key.
Generally speaking, it will target your document files (doc, docx, xls, xlsx etc) and your picture files (jpg, png, tga, pic, etc) and about anything else they can think of that you care about. In some particularly brutal cases, it will hunt down and encrypt your backup files as well. These files become completely unusable. They cannot be recovered through any means beyond paying the ransom and praying the terrorists will actually give you the key to get your documents back.
So. Please, please, make many backups of your documents, pictures and every other file on your computer that you interact with. We don't care about any of the operating system files, or any of the software files. Those are easily replaceable. Your documents though, your novels, your notebooks. Those are irreplaceable.
Don't be lulled into a false sense of "it won't happen to me" because it does. Every day. A company I'm associated with paid a ransom of $350,000 in December. Their files were recovered, thank goodness. Those crooks were "honest". But all the files in the entire network, literally millions of them, were encrypted, and ALL backup files were also encrypted.
What can you do?
Back up your files to a USB backup drive (like you might buy at Costco or Walmart for $100 or less) and then DISCONNECT that backup drive from your computer unless you're actively using it to back things up.
Upload a copy of your work to Google or OneDrive.
Backup your entire document collection, heck, your entire hard drive - to a service like iDrive or Carbonite. They are very cheap, costing only pennies per day, but that data will be there safely away from YOUR computer if you get struck by a ransomware virus.
Please take this seriously. For a writer, their entire life. Their entire career. Their entire psyche resides in their collection of works on their computer. And way too often, they don't realize how close they are every day to losing it all.
All it takes it a simple click on an email. A innocuous email from "Fedex" that tells you about a package being sent to you. You aren't expecting a package, so you click on the provided link to tell Fedex they have the wrong person. Then - 30 seconds later you get a popup saying your files are gone. They are encrypted. And it's too late to anything about it.
Please back things up. Please put your precious documents on some outside location, not connected to your computer. And most of all, please don't click on anything that looks the least suspicious.
Sorry, wrote a novel there. But this is near and dear to my heart. Being in the IT profession, I see it all the time. Literally every day.
