 So ransomware once this came out a few years back. It was clear This was going to be the largest attack attack vector We're gonna see because it makes so much money for those that run it now This is all run by people who generally remain anonymous. They launder the money They are generally in non extradition countries usually Russia or former Soviet States and they send out these attacks and they're effective because they make a lot of money and Because these people don't back up now people always ask me about ransomware And now this is the police losing eight years of evidence in a ransomware attack that Texas cops decided not to pay the ransom So video evidence and office documents dating back to 2009 were lost now They claim to have hard copies of a lot of this so some of it and we don't really know what of course because this is in Terms of the police department will be able to be like restored. I guess I'm not real clear on all of this They did decide not to pay the ransom But if they do pay the ransom you in you immediately end up with a chain of custody problem of you had infected systems So now that evidence has now been touched by an outside party and messed with encrypted decrypted or whatever Now this comes down to they did not have proper backups. I do recommend layers of protection antivirus and all those wonderful things and being super careful and But I will not bet my life on any of those things that nothing will happen to data They're all great layers. They stop lots of the known viruses But the hackers because there's a very big big big financial incentive for them. They are looking for ways in all the time so in this particular case it was a spoofed email that got them in and Created this chaos because the only backups they had was one revision deep Which means when the backup ran it backed up all the encrypted files and overwrote all the good files And they didn't have a series of backups We always recommend revision backups because of this which means you can store for previous versions If you're not sure if you have one create a file wait a week See if you can restore last week's version of that file like create different iterations of it This is an easy way to test your IT person and see if they're actually doing their job properly Unfortunately, they never tested and it gets tested in an emergency situation and the test failed now This is not the first time. This is an article from 2015 police pay off ransom again This is a recurring theme here with recent cases of a Massachusetts department that had to pay just to get their files back This is a constant problem and people are always asking well won't law enforcement protect me They can't protect themselves They are is doing is poorly with this ransomware and everything protections as the private sector Maybe even worse because of the way the budgets and everything works within government They're harder to implement things. I don't know my friends who worked in government have told me horror stories I'm just trying to get a system patched and being stuck in the hell of filling out forms to authorize it And you know, I I'll take everything they see with the great assault But I will admit this doesn't bear well for them and kind of puts it on their side that this is really an issue Now spam email is like I said the most likely infection They sent this in there some type of police department They sent out a notice here, but it's still a major problem for both the private sector Now, it's obviously really a big deal when you hear about it with the police departments And but I will tell you working in this industry. This is happening constantly to little small five person offices This is a you know cat and mouse game and I we often pick up clients because of this because they thought their IT guy was doing it And a lot of people say oh, it's not gonna happen to me. I'm not a big target. I'm not a police department I'm not one of these other places. Oh, no, it's happening to small places It never makes the news because it's not so to speak newsworthy to the news to report on every small business Not to mention many of these small businesses that were hit are embarrassed that they had no proper protection And don't want their customer confidence shaken and I can tell you that there have been many local companies In the Detroit area that haven't hit by this and do everything they can to remediate and this is sometimes I guess it how we picked them up as clients is because their previous IT company wasn't doing this They weren't backing up properly and we'll go a step further. I noticed this here ransomware disrupts the Washington DCCC system 70% of the cameras for the police department We're also infected with ransomware So here comes a big mess out right out of Washington from this So if you're thinking the government's gonna protect you don't hold your breath You think the government's gonna go chase these guys across the pond, you know And go find them in the former Soviet states and try to find them. Good luck They're still trying to figure out how to decrypt their files So you need to protect yourself you need proper backups in order to defeat bans somewhere in backups are of course the failsafe last Solution in the front side is having some top of proper layers of protection and really reading those emails if they're spoofed My friend had a great story the other day that they had gotten a spoofed email at his company And the financial officer said I realized it was spoofed because the spelling was much better than the CEOs Which I thought was a funny way they actually spelled it too well and it was too well crafted They said he his English isn't that good. He just doesn't write well And I thought that was great So they were able to completely recognize it as a spoofed email But there are security and protection things you can put in place. There is anti virus out there. There is Web filtering out there, you know, this is services we offer. There's nothing everyone always asked me What's the best free antivirus? I said unfortunately, I don't think any free ones are all that great You get what you pay for the free ones are okay We offer a layer protection system that we sell to our clients, which has proved fairly effective knock on wood No one has got none of the ransomware has gotten through on here with the exception of the guy who went and uninstalled all of it to Try to really insist that he was trying to get a file that he knows he shouldn't have got That is the one time because we couldn't figure out how it got there and a guy admitted he uninstalled our software and Well that that will do it Yeah, we can't protect people from the cell sometimes At least he was honest with us, but overall get some protection make sure you have backups That's the best thing you can do make sure that you set up everything for two-factor authentication So you don't get your email stolen make sure that you've got Iterations not just a backup that you copy and it overwrites each time but a revisioning backup system You know, we recommend a lot of times people the iDrive for example iDrive.com great for personal backups It's reasonably priced and provides revisioning. There's several other ones out there But just keep an eye out for this and like I said, don't trust the government who has who's still trying to deal with this themselves And get a get a handle on it. I don't trust them to protect you protect yourself That's the best way you're gonna do this and don't think it won't happen to you This happens to individuals all the time this happens to small businesses Daily you just don't see about it in the news until it's the police department because that really Well, that means noteworthy news here because when the people that are paid to protect us Are or not protected themselves. That's a little scary losing evidence This is terrible on both sides of the fence here Whether you're being prosecuted or you're hoping to have a criminal who? Did something prosecuted and suddenly this leaves that all in a lurch. So thanks for listening and Like and subscribe if you like the content here and if you have any comments, so leave them below. Thanks