I just read an article on a particular bad strain of computer virus (I won’t mention the name, rather not have any spidering connect it to my domain) that turns into ransomware by taking a user’s files hostage and making them pay to get access to them again. Okay, so that’s nothing new, but the article said that there was no known way yet to recover your files on your own, except from a backup. Regardless of whether a program like Malwarebytes or the like can ever get a “fix” for this, I find it disturbing that it is basically ‘game over’ for someone who picks up this pernicious bit of malware.
Let me also mention another article I happened to read today where the author was lamenting the fact that he lost his Box.com cloud storage account earlier this year, and it took six months to get it worked out (and it did work out well in the end, but he thinks that if he had not pulled his ‘reporter’ card, he would not have received anything… the Box people had to work hard to make it right). All of his files just went poof and disappeared, and Box couldn’t even find any of his old account information. He said this was more of a mild annoyance because of the type of files he kept there but went on to say that if it had been his Dropbox account he would have been in a world of hurt. I can understand the sentiment.
I am a firm believer in backups, and in layers. I use Dropbox and SkyDrive for continuous cloud syncing so that I can share select folders among several PC and laptop systems and a couple Apple iOS devices when needed. I use Crashplan and Carbonite for continuous backups to their respective cloud servers (Actually, Carbonite is on its way out in a couple months, as they ticked me off earlier this year and I like Crashplan better anyway). Once a month I hook up a 2TB USB drive (that I keep stored away from my house) and do a full backup of all the files I care about. It doesn’t seem that long ago I was backing up to CDs and DVDs… but when you get into the 1TB range of data, the DVD-Rs just don’t cut it. 🙂
What caused me pause today was realizing what could potentially happen if my main workstation at home picked up the nasty little malware mentioned above. The PC is used mostly by my wife and I trust that she is careful and practices good Internet hygiene, but all it takes is swinging by the wrong web site and it’s possible to pick up a baddie like this. So if it did get activated on the PC, it could start going through the whole hard drive and begin encrypting many of the data files. For the Dropbox folder, for example, as each file gets updated by the virus, it dutifully gets copied up to Dropbox’s servers, which then forces the file to update on my various other systems. And then Crashplan wakes up a little later and ALSO sends off each modified file to its backup servers. To make it extra worse, I may not even know this was happening for some time, possibly discovering the issue hours later when the virus has done its business.
(Okay, granted, at this point I could go into Dropbox and use its “restore from a previous version” feature. I’ve only done this once or twice, but this was on their website interface and I can’t imagine having to do this for any kind of large number of files.)
So now, if there was no tool available to counteract the effects of the virus, I might be looking at restoring from my last good backup on the 2TB USB drive, and I’ve lost all my updates from when that backup was made to the present time. Even if I could clean up the virus and get my files back, I’m pretty sure I would be looking at nuking the PC and starting over from complete scratch, because once you’ve picked up a bad virus you’ll never really know if you’re totally clean. I could then get back to a clean OS installation and a clean copy of my backed up files, but I’m still out any recent updates. And then what do I do about my Dropbox and Skydrive and Crashplan files that have all been whacked? Delete them all and start over? And regarding cloud services themselves, can you really rely on a service that might just “forget” that you even had a digital relationship with them?
Guess I have to spend some time thinking this through, as I’m sure there are even more ramifications in this scenario. I know right NOW I’m doing a full backup of my Dropbox and Skydrive files to somewhere offline. It might be a little early before my monthly USB drive backup, but I think I’ll bring that home tomorrow…