Any one run in to one of these bad boys? I am confident in our IT personnel and relatively confident in my ability to keep out of trouble with my PC at work, but the laptop at home and especially my wife and kids are an entirely other matter.
I end up fixing whatever messes they create, shocker, so I was wondering if anyone here knows what 'social engineering' scams these guys are running or any other specifics to look out for. Currently our IT guys are at DEFCON 1 on this making me think it must be more prevalent than ever.
Steve
I haven't heard of it being more prevalent, but that doesn't mean much (I do miss things).
Easy answer: lock down the home computers as tightly as possible with parental type software. If "they" can't access the internet, they can't get infected leaving you a big old mess to clean up. 😀
Just be prepared to hear whining and crying since the home folks just can't be bothered to listen to your sage advice and "stay safe" on the big bad internet....
I have this exact same issue at home AND more importantly at my 84 year old father's place. Once a month I back up the home/Dad computers to a portable drive (I use Acronis, but anything will do.) I have a bootable DVD which will then restore the computer to the backed up state.
And then I tell them: if you screw it up, I will recover to the monthly backup. No exceptions.
Everyone is setup to move pictures to Google Drive which is probably the only thing that really matters.
So it takes 15 minutes per machine for backup per month, but I can fold socks during the backup process. Restore is actually faster.
First sign of trouble, poof! You are returned to the previous month. I keep about 6 months worth of back ups for each computer.
We had one computer hit by ransomware at work about a year ago. The people here are typically very careful about what emails they open and websites they visit so can't blame anyone.
First thing I did was start researching it and the funny thing is that some people actually suggested that they had paid and the thieves were good to their word and sent an unlock code once the fee was paid.
I simply could not stomach that and wiped the computer clean and started over. It did also affect some network folders as well but a simple restore of our backup and we were good to go.
While a major PIA at that moment, there was no way we were going to send them money.
