Quick update (and seriously back your stuff up)
As you may recall in a previous episode we were being kicked off of Skystra because a relatively low-traffic website was somehow taking up a good 30% of resources constantly. We moved from Skystra over to Siteground and figured out pretty much what had been happening at Skystra for several months on day 2, which irks me. Still in the middle of the move, but the site is mostly here.
I got called in last week to work for a client who got hit by ransomware. One machine got hit, it looks like it may have been from a fake Chrome update but I’m still looking. It was a Dharma variant with some new tricks and no, nothing decrypts it and the recovery software we used which is recommended nope. Killed the backups it had access to, far as I can tell wiped file history, and went out and discovered every computer in its subnet and went to town on them.
Toast, everything. File history turned off. Drives filled, network drives filled, and a request for about $10,000 or the data gets floated out to the dark web and the decryption key goes bye bye.
Backups saved the servers after a multi-day restore, but the process of redeploying two highly customized workstations has consumed any Pocketables time for Paul for the next few days.
Paul will be back after rebuilding a network from scratch, but really wanted to seriously urge people to back up your data to somewhere your computer cannot touch. Got a plug in USB drive to back things up? Great. Unplug it after you back it up. Got a backup sitting on a network share? Great – disconnect it because a virus/ransomware can find and delete it. Using a backup solution that allows you to instantly erase all your data off of the cloud? Yeah, about that…
I’m not turning this into an advertisement, but letting you know for about $6 a month you can back up everything to the cloud. Don’t pay much more.
