Beating Ransomware

I recently had to help someone out with some ransomware. It’s a pretty miserable experience to find someone has lost all their data.

The story ended fairly well though; all the most important data was in Dropbox. The really short version is that even though the data was corrupted, it was possible to raise a support ticket to roll back the badness. I hadn’t known this was possible until I researched it. Cool.

It was a tense few hours though. The first thing we did was shutdown the affected computer. Then we accessed Dropbox from another computer, went to settings and disconnected the affected machine. We had to run through the various file events to diagnose the point at which things went wrong and this allowed us to raise that support ticket.

It took about 24 hours to rollback. And I needed to (or we chose to) reinstall the OS from scratch. And some important data outside of Dropbox was still lost. I know I keep going on about Dropbox — I don’t have shares in them — it’s just what we had available. I fully expect there is an equivalent feature in OneDrive, AmazonCloud, iCloud, Box and Google Drive — although if that’s what you use it might be worth double checking.

Set up your cloud backup now.

That big scary ransomware cat doesn’t look quite so scary now.

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