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posted by martyb on Thursday October 29 2015, @10:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the backups-just-do-it dept.

There is a particularly devious type of malicious software that locks users out of their own computer systems until an individual agrees to pay a ransom to the hackers. In these cases, the FBI has surprisingly suggested just ponying up the dough.

It's not the type of advice one would typically expected from the FBI, but that's exactly what was recommended by Joseph Bonavolonta, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's CYBER and Counterintelligence Program Boston office.

"The ransomware is that good," said Bonavolonta at the 2015 Cyber Security Summit in Boston, as quoted by Security Ledger. "To be honest, we often advise people just to pay the ransom."

https://www.rt.com/usa/319913-fbi-pay-ransomware-hackers/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

Yeah, it's RT, but I did a search, and that or similar headlines popped up on dozens of news sites. I clicked a couple of them, and the stories match. Try this one,
https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/fbi-ransomware-malware.html

Personally, I can almost certainly afford to nuke and reinstall, unless they get my RAID array. Then - I'd have to think hard.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @04:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @04:12PM (#256082)

    seems like not everybody is running openbsd on their desktops/laptops

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @04:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @04:32PM (#256093)

    Sorry, but OpenBSD won't protect you from that type of malware. Sure, the malware could not encrypt your complete disk. But you don't care that much for the contents of /usr/bin, do you? The data you care about is usually in your user account, and especially writeable from your user account. And thus it can also be encrypted from your user account. Your user account is no better protected under OpenBSD than under any other operating system.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @06:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @06:12PM (#256143)

    I have a laptop less than 10 years old, so I doubt BSD supports any of the hardware. I also have a USB mouse, so that seems unlikely to work as well.

  • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Friday October 30 2015, @01:53AM

    by isostatic (365) on Friday October 30 2015, @01:53AM (#256310) Journal

    What good is a secure operating system when you download and run a script

    #!/bin/sh
    sudo rm -Rf /