Alva Review-Courier -

A massive ransomware computer virus was launched last week that has been described as one of the most serious in history. Its name is “WannaCry.”

Ransomware is software that is sneaked onto your computer by bad guys. When triggered, you are shown a screen with a telephone number and are told if you want to access your files, you will need to pay a fee. I receive one of those demands about once a week and so far have avoided the damage by unplugging the computer from the wall. That way, I didn't click on any trigger buttons on the screen. I'm not so sure this defensive technique will work for WannaCry.

Several weeks ago, Microsoft released a Windows 10 update that corrected the vulnerability that the latest ransom-ware uses. However, many people skip around Microsoft's updates because some of them are so large they take hours to download and the computer user has work to do.

The WannaCry ramsomware is SO serious that Microsoft has taken the unprecedented step of issuing a patch for Windows XP. Microsoft quit supporting Windows XP in 2014. But many older systems are still in use and this patch is desperately needed. By the way, you will need to already have upgraded Windows XP with SP1 and SP2 service pack upgrades. That should have happened years ago.

The latest will be known as SP3.

At the newspaper, we have two computers still running XP and it would kill us if they suddenly quit working. We keep trying to find software we can afford to replace what is running on XP.

Quoting from CNN Tech

“WannaCry has already caused massive disruption around the globe. Sixteen National Health Service organizations in the UK were hit, and some of those hospitals canceled outpatient appointments and told people to avoid emergency departments if possible. The NHS said in a statement on Saturday that there was no evidence that patient information had been compromised.

In China, the internet security company Qihoo360 issued a “red alert” saying that a large number of colleges and students in the country had been affected by the ransomware, which is also referred to as WannaCrypt. State media reported that digital payment systems at PetroChina gas stations were offline, forcing customers to pay cash.

“Global internet security has reached a moment of emergency,” Qihoo360 warned.

Major global companies said they also came under attack.

Fedex said Friday it was “experiencing interference with some of our Windows-based systems caused by malware” and was trying to fix the problems as quickly as possible. Two big telecom companies, Telefónica (TEF) of Spain and Megafon of Russia, were also hit.

“This is turning into the biggest cybersecurity incident I've ever seen,” UK-based security architect Kevin Beaumont said.

Lynn's Amateur-Like Advice

If you can quickly clone your boot drive (or also your data drive), and place it on a shelf where it is not electrically hooked to a computer, you are in a pretty good position to restore ransom-ware “locked files.” I would recommend having several hard drive backups that you update in sequence. By this, have a drive labeled Monday, another labeled Tuesday, and so on until you have a week's worth of backups.

The reason for multiple backups is if on the day you get hit with ransomware you overwrite your single hard drive backup, you are sunk. One terrabyte empty drives can be purchased at Radio Shack in Alva for $99. While buying $500 worth of hard drives is expensive, it's better than paying a $20,000 ransom request that large firms have received.

I suppose you could back up to the “cloud,” but that might be very time consuming and possibly expensive also. That cost is solely dependent upon the size of your data.