No More Ransom

[labbe5]

https://www.nomoreransom.org/

Ransomware, just the name of it is making authorities nervous. No organization is immune to ransomware, except if a good security infrastructure is in place to fight against it : hospitals have been infected with it, and were forced to pay to have their data back. Ironically, even police stations have found their system compromised, and they too had to pay a ransom to have their data back, even though FBI has this to say : don't pay, ever. The growth of ransomware infection is related to the fact people are willing to pay ransom to get their hands on their data, thus making this problem more prevalent than ever.

No More Ransom, a public-private organization composed of Kaspersky Lab, Intel Security and the Dutch National Police, and Europol is fighting back against this modern scourge :
The cooperative effort is in response to a massive uptick in crypto-ransomware victims that rose 550 percent between 2014 and 2015 (from 131,000 to 728,000), according to Kaspersky Lab data.

Hopefully, this organization will help people and organizations alike in its goal to eradicate ransomware, or making it irrelevant :

The initiative offers four decryptors that can snuff out the threat of nearly two dozen ransomware variants, from CryptXXX to Shade to CoinVault. The Shade decryption tool alone has 160,000 keys. The Shade decryption key, an important asset in the No More Ransom arsenal, has already blocked 27,000 attempts to attack users with Shade Trojan. No More Ransom says more decryption keys will be added as the project matures.

The Linux platform is not immune to this threat, but users of Linux are far less likely to be affected. Why? Not enough users, compared to Windows, meaning the pay off pale in comparison.

[learnhow2code]

very cool.

backups help too. one of the nice things about puppy is that if your hard drive gets encrypted, and you have a backup, you can just format and-- actually puppy is REALLY REALLY good for stuff like this.

the fact that so many people boot live, and that installation isnt a given.

some distros are live distros, most are for installing. ubuntu isnt for running live, though you can.

puppy is a live distro even when you install it. thats just part of the culture here. and that helps.