What is a ransomware attack and why does it make me have backup?

A few days ago, when we were talking about the use of the BitcoinsWe said they used to pay for ransom. when your computer had been the victim of a ransomware.

I don’t know if you’ll remember a news from last summer (2017) which even went on the noon TV news related to this type of attack, in particular a ransomware called Wannacry. In addition, some companies in Spain were affected, even Telefónica suffered a small incident without much impact on their networks but that came to the media because some employees leaked the news on social networks where they explained that they had been made to leave their computer and go home.

Yeah, I know it looks like Ransomware is a good thing to let us go home in the middle of the working day, but it’s not always that cool. Another variety of ransomware, in this case called Petya managed to cipher and then turn off the servers of hundreds of companies in the world with many millions in losses, no longer just for lost data, but for the stop of some of its most important systems and servers, as in the case of the pharmaceutical technology company Merk where Petya’s infection caused them to lose

EUR 116 million by stopping the production chain of a known vaccine against cervical cancer. Let’s see what this was all about and how we can avoid it..

Basically, a ansomware is a very bad program that figures your computer’s files with a password that only the creator knows (We haven’t talked about encryption on computers yet but if we comment on it in time for mobile devices, so I’m in. As only the creator knows that password, literally asks you for a rescue by giving you the password to release your files… Come on, a full-fledged blackmail. And as in the blackmail of the movies, you can

in several things happen:

· That you pay for the password and return them (best of cases)· That you pay for the password and do not return them (the worst, obviously) · That you decide not to pay because you are like the Batman of computers (phrase from the film Mr. and Mrs. Smith) and believe that you will be able to recover everything from the backup, which is very good if you really have a backup of your files as we commented a few weeks ago.

«I decide to pay, I don’t want to risk losing it.»

In fact, You’ve already taken a risk and lost them for not having a good security policy, a correct training plan or a good antivirus.. And why do I say this now with the disgust you have for your files? Because years ago, with the first computer viruses, you were going to a friend’s house (my friend was called Luis) and you were recording the game ‘Lemmings’ on a diskette, but when you came to your house and copied it on your hard drive, the computer was starting to do weird things… some more nice things like those of the

nk «> virus bars, which crossed the screen with two vertical stripes as bars, the virus Mirror that reflected your monitor as if you were seeing it in a mirror, the potato that asked for potatoes every time (like my son Paul, but he asked them with fuet) and other very dark things like the virus Friday 13, which was activated every Friday 13 and eliminated all the programs you would run that day.

The funny thing is, in these cases you had done nothing, simply by copying the files on a diskette and putting it on your computer you were already infected. Today it’s not like that, viruses are trying to trick you into running them, you have to double it. click in them, so they come by email pretending to be a light bill, or as if a friend sent you a link in English of a web where you have to make click saying that they are the photos of the last company dinner, or as if DHL or Seur told you that you are going to get the last iPhone in the next few days and that you have to h

acer click to see the details of the shipment. Anything is worth cheating on us and that we expressly do click in the virus to infect us as we said at the beginning of this paragraph, If you have a good antivirus to remove these malicious attachments, a good security policy that prevents you from connecting to external sites to the company from email or have simply had the right training to know that Iberdrola JAMÁS is going to send you an invoice in an English email unless you request it, as you are more protected.

Well, I’m sorry about the tan, but the thing is, you say that You want to pay Right? Well, in that case, Ransomware makes things very easy and will show you a message asking for a lot of bitcoins or another cryptomoneda and the virtual portfolio where to enter it. Once you do this, you will receive the password you must enter to recover your files. Easy, huh?

But if it’s that easy… Why does the Civil Computer Crime Guard recommend NOT to pay? Because If we pay it’s gonna keep happening… and we don’t even have the guarantee to get our files back. sometimes We do the bitcoin transfer and we get nothing in return., so we have nothing left but to reinstall the computer and recover what we have in the backup.

I hear I’m not saying we don’t have to pay, not even the Civil Guard says so, just recommend not to do it… but everyone’s free to do it or not. On many occasions it works and we receive the password from the files, but on many others we will only lose the money.

«I decide not to pay, that the Kings and the company dinners approach»

I must recognize that some hackers are very bad, but they have a sense of humor. There is a type of ransomware that gives you the possibility of not paying for your files But, to get the password, You have to send the ansomware to 3 friends to get infected and if they pay for your files! Yeah, okay, it’s despicable for you to flirt, but we all have friends with a lot of money that can afford it better than us! Remember the movie Saw where to save your life you had to brush the one you had next to and not with those you had them all c

you are, aren’t you? Well, that’s the same thing, but like, light No blood, no guts.

If you’re a good person and you don’t want to do that, you have to reinstall and recover the files from the backup you have. But this doesn’t end your problems, sometimes we don’t remember having done click in no file in the last few days (it is a lie, we remember that a few weeks ago we opened the link of the partner thinking it would be the company photos… and they weren’t, which made us suspect that something bad was going to happen), this is because the ansomware was installed at some point but waiting for a given date or a remote activation command of

Your creator, so if we reinstall from the backup we did last night, the same may happen to us again.

What can we do to be protected?

Unfortunately an antivirus is no longer enough, antivirus manufacturers say it’s impossible to detect absolutely everything because the threats are changing every minute (except those of Panda Antivirus, which are colder than an eight and say they do detect everything… because they are from Bilbao).

In addition to updated antivirus that will free us from almost everything We must. have enough common sense to detect abnormal situations, that is, we already have half-internalized that our bank will not send us an email requesting our credit card number and the PIN… we also distrust someone who asks us for our Gmail password even if it looks like it comes from Gmail… because the same thing we have to do with those rare files that ever come by email arguing to be a strange invoice, sending a package we haven’t bought or the secret photos of Pamela Ander

I think the example of Pamela Anderson stayed in the ’90s. It seems simple but it’s not, get us out of our hurry with the mobile or computer, the 50 emails we still have to read, the WhatsApp groups, etc. and stop and think if that mail or that link may be lawful, it means effort and a lot of practice… but unfortunately it’s the only way to be 100% sure that those viruses or stupid programs now that need you to double up click They’re not gonna infect our device.