When Backups Might Not Save You from Ransomware

⚠️ Ransomware is known for encrypting your data and holding it hostage. It turns out that backups might not save you from everything ransomware can do.

Why Backups Might Fail Against Ransomware
Most ransomware simply encrypts files on your computer, and possibly your backups. Backups remain the most important safety net to recover from all malware, including nearly all ransomware. Some recent ransomware also threatens to publicly expose your data unless the ransom is paid. The best defense against this and all forms of malware are the steps you should already be taking to stay safe: using up-to-date software, having security measures in place, avoiding risky behaviors online, and being skeptical of phishing and malicious attachments.

Chapters
0:00 Backups and ransomware
0:12 The importance of backing up
0:38 Ransomware and encryption
1:18 Backups can be complicated, but critical
2:20 Backup your backups
2:50 Macrium Image Guardian
3:55 Cloud storage
4:45 A new threat
6:53 The new threat is an old threat
7:20 The new defense is the old defense
8:00 Keep. Backing. Up.

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#askleo #ransomware #backup

[askleonotenboom]

Some ransomware goes beyond encryption. There is another way to hold your data hostage.

[MarkWilliams-ixqf]

Very good advice. I help my relatives with computer problems, and the one that's big lately has been Ransomware. My relative had not been making image backups, just saving a few data files to a thumb drive now and then. He visited an unsafe website, and sadly must have clicked on something that brought in ransomware. He is a trusting soul and could not believe he had been attacked. He actually called them and almost gave them the ransom via credit card, but he hesitated and called me. Shutdown immediately I said. Fortunately I had made an image backup when I set up his new system years ago, and we could restore from that, keeping all his old applications but not his last two years of new data. Because we had no recovery drive, I had to put his image drive in a similar laptop and use PC Mover to transfer his applications and data to his system, which also had a brand new SSD drive (yes, I probably could have erased his old drive, but I really did not want to put that drive on any clean system, just not sure how ransomware spreads itself). I set him up with a backup regime using two external drives that he alternates, using Windows 7 backup. Both backup drives have a full image backup, and incremental backups that are almost current, depending on when he last swapped drives. Seems good enough for now. But it was time consuming to fix, and I hope he avoids repeating his mistake. I am concerned about new malware infecting a backup, maybe look at Macrium to protect the backup drives. This seems like an ongoing war like the old Mad magazine Spy vs Spy comic.

[JanetDax]

I periodically image backup the OS and gaming partitions to an external HD. This gives me the advantage of being able to just restoring the OS if there are system problems.

[peternospam]

another way to help protect against having to pay ransom to prevent release of your data....is to encrypt your data (example, cryptomator)

[johnpro]

how about banning email from work related computers .?.insist a separate non critical computer is used for emails Seems that lots of ransomware comes via emails.

[glasslinger]

All my critical data is on a non-internet connected computer. The only way to get that data is with a USB drive manually moved between the two computers.

[sylvainalain]

I use Macrium too and I don’t sync to the cloud, I use instead Duplicacy and Wasabi. Syncing to the cloud is not a good idea.

[menguardingtheirownwallets]

I keep all of my backups on a separate external HD, one that I unplug from my computer, and I just back it up every month. I never leave it connected to my computer. I store all of my data on an external HD plugged into my computer, I don't actually store any data on the computer itself. Plus I use a Chromebook to connect to the Internet, and a Chromebook cannot be infected with Ransomware.

[dibyajyotisahoo]

can i store in pendrive latter i can recover