Bad People
Will Do Bad Things to Your PC...and Your Mac
There are a lot of bad
things ready to attack your computer. For years we called them all
viruses, but that wasn't totally accurate. Today there are known as
malware which includes viruses, worms, trojan horses, spyware, and
ransomware. It's said ransomware is the worst and now I understand
why.
I'm uaually cautious when
I use the computer. The other day I needed a small program that was
offered as “Freeware”, a program that had limited application but
was available with full features at a price. When I was ready to
download, I noticed that I would need to use OpenCandy
as the installer for the program. I consider OpenCandy to be
spyware and declined to download the program.
But I was preoccupies
when I, in an unguarded moment, scanning through my emails, clicked
on a message that sounded vaguely innocent, something about
incorrectly paying an invoice. The message was blank except for a
link. Stupidly I clicked the link.
You may have seen these
emails recently on your computer. I have two in today's email. One
from Christian Hull who uses Bill 4F0016 as his subject. Drew Key
lists Payment Confirmation as his subject. They both have
attachments. Both names are unknown to me.
A day after I mistakenly
shrugged off the mumbo-jumbo attachment, my computer began running at
at turtle speed. I checked to see what was hogging all of my
computer's resources. A program named CgYrXlur.exe was running and
using over 50% of my computer's capacity. I Googled the file name but
nothing relevant came back. Suspicious, I closed everything that was
running and opened MalWarebytes,
a free program everyone should have. I ran a scan and I had a big
problem. A program called LOCKY had begun encrypting my files.
MalWarebytes stopped and deleted it and I ran Regedit to clean
another few LOCKY lines of code from my registry.
Even catching Locky early
was too late. Thousands of my documents had been encrypted with
military style RSA-2048
and AES-128
ciphers
and were unusable.
I got rid of LOCKY before
it could display
its ransom note but it has been posted on a number of “help
sites.” The instructions were to forward bitcoins to them and they
would send me a “key” to decrypt my files. Just over $200. But
these people weren't Sunday School teachers. What incentive did they
have to restore my data once they had my money? I elected to restore
what I could.
Windows System Restore
did nothing.
Since the data was
encrypted, not deleted, the websites I visited recommended a program
that restored deleted or damaged files. I bought Data Recovery Pro
for roughly fifty dollars. It restored a bunch of Windows graphics
(buttons, punctuation marks, arrows) but didn't tell me where they
had originally been on my hard drive so they're useless. Data? A few
pictures, zero documents. I emailed their support team but never
heard back.
Recuva
is a free program and it produced slightly better results,
especially with .jpgs, finding maybe 500 files out of thousands.
What saved me?
First and foremost was
Dropbox,
a cloud storage program. I was able to restore my Grub Street
Printing files, albeit just a few at a time which is time consuming
if you're restoring thousand of files. But it absolutely worked.
Also, I have five
computers scattered around the house. Whenever I work at a different
computer, I just copy what I need from another computer via my home
network, use it and save it. I never considered it “backing up”
files, but that's what I was doing.
Over 10,000 encrypted
files were deleted. For some reason music and video were untouched,
but pictures and text files were about 75% affected.
On March 31, Bitdefender
Labs announced a free program to protect your computer from the
newest ransomware. You can download their protective “vaccine”
here.
Click on the red Bitdefender website.Oh,
you think it can't happen on your Mac? Think again. Ransomware
for the Mac that begins with an iCloud hack has just been found.
Don't use iCloud? Don't
relax.
Partners
Closing
Word
reached me yesterday (March 31) that Partners
Distributing will close. Over the years I've worked with Partners
and have recommended their services to a number of you. An era has
ended and I fear we are the worse for it.
Trouble
in Paradise
NYT
May Ban Ad-Block Use
Do
You Rely on Data?
Patent
Trolls Still Trolling
A
few years ago we wrote about patent trolls and the high probability
that Apple was one. Now, patents
sold to investors by RRD years ago are in play, used to bring
lawsuits against printers by the investors that now own them.
eBooks,
Literacy, and Impoverished Schools
Now
that my son lives in an area with limited broadband available, I'm
not surprised to learn that many school systems in such communities
have little or no access to the internet. Clearly ebooks
are no panacea for illiteracy in these areas.
Millenials
Trying
to get noticed by the next generation with cash to spend? Here's
what works to catch
their attention.
Book
Marketing and Social Networks
I
know you've been told that compulsive posting, editing and updating
on your Twitter, Facebook, etc. accounts will sell thousands of your
books. So why hasn't it? Here's
why.
Uncoated
Text Stocks Price Rising
The
U.S. Trade Commission has unanimously found that uncoated paper is
being imported and sold below its cost. Import
tariffs will be imposed
to level the playing field for U.S. Paper mills.
eBook
Indexes
Nonfiction
sells well as ebooks but generally omits
any sort of usable index.
By not following the traditional “index in the back format,”
eBook publishers have an opportunity to re-imagine and take advantage
of the opportunities digital publishing offers.
Tablets
vs. eReaders
Shakespeare's
Libido
I'm
ashamed to admit that I've forgotten almost everything I studied many
years ago in Shakespeare 301. But I'm sure this
provides insights to the Bard that were never taught in 1970.
America's
Ridiculous Copyright Laws
Final
Thought
Classics
are not classics because hoary with age — they are the steel balls
which have worn down mountains but remained unchanged in the mill of
time. Martin
H. Fischer
