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On Wed, Oct 28, 2015 at 08:19:27AM +0000, Neil Winchurst wrote: > It is not just about computers, but includes other items such as scam > phone calls and scam mail. However there was one section about a fairly > new method called ransom scam. The scenario goes like this. > > You go to log on to your computer as normal but just see a message on > the screen telling you that your computer has been hacked and all your > files have been encrypted. The hackers will kindly decrypt them for a > fee, which often is requested in bit coins. One catch, there is a > deadline for payment. Miss that and the fee goes up. If you use your > computer for your business you have a problem. This is called ransomware and has, indeed, been a huge problem in the past two years. It's been very profitable for computer criminals. (I just saw the other reply; it is also referred to as CryptoLocker, after the first popular ransomware. CryptoLocker was shut down in June last year, but many other variants have sprung up since, some of which use the CryptoLocker 'brand'.) > This is proving to be very profitable for the scammers, and has become > very sophisticated recently. Even if you have backups, they often turn > out to be encrypted too. It depends how your backup is set. If your backups are stored on a second hard disk, or an external drive, or even a remote drive (e.g. Dropbox) that is always "mounted" (plugged in), then yes, it's going to affect your backups as well. If you manually make weekly/monthly backups, you should usually be fine. > As Linux users are we less likely to have this problem? Not in theory. There's nothing in Linux that prevents something like this from happening. The ransomware is essentially the same as a program that lets you encrypt all your files. The only difference is that in the latter case, you own the key. In practice, Linux desktops have too small a marketshare for criminals to bother. > When I install a new version of Linux, (I use Xubuntu 14.04 LTS at the > moment, but a new LTS version is due out next April), I notice an > option to 'encrypt the whole disk'. I have always ignored this, but > would it be a good idea to go along with it? It wouldn't protect you against ransomware, as that would just encrypt the files again, using its own encryption key. It means that if your computer is stolen, no one can read the information on your hard drive. Which is good, as such information could be used to commit for instance identity theft. Martijn.
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