sboots wrote:
Good article. I remember pretty much the entire timeline, but what sticks out for me was the birth of ransomware that successfully encrypted files. I was very actively involved with Microsoft Security Essentials back then and the forums were full of tales of woe from users who had lost everything to ransomware. Back then there were no solutions to recover the files at all -- it was a painful time.
Actually the first ransomwares were easy to beat. The early versions relied on an internet connection to function. I removed from several systems just by removing the system from the net and then running security scans. The second generation of ransomware is when the real issue arrived.
Still such issues are why I keep an external drive partitioned to where it can have a system image done whenever I deem needed for all three of my systems that is not normally connected to any system unless an image is being done. This drive also gets all my data saved.
My real concern as to an attack would be my media drives. I do sync all my media between two different systems but how do you go about doing a image backup when you have close to 6 TB of media? Sure, I could get an external drive to do the job but how long would it take to do an image through USB of almost 6 TB of media, a week?