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Police-themed Ransomware Starts Targeting Us And Canadian Users
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Evildave 
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- Group: Members
- Posts: 4,287
- Joined: 24-January 08
Posted 30 May 2012 - 08:58 PM
ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR DATA.
It's hard to 'ransom' what you can trivially restore. In other words, this only underlines the vast quantities of FOOLS who have no backup.
Hint: The FBI, along with local police will come visit you IN PERSON to take away systems and software, if you violate any laws. A SWAT team with a warrant, no less. They don't 'notify' you that you're committing crimes. They come to get you.
Fines/tickets are always done through snail mail or messengers.
Secure, secret, off-site backup is recommended if interaction with law enforcement is ever a possibility. If they come to take your stuff, you will probably never see any of it again, and if you do, not for years and years.
As for a secure sandbox (what the 'makaseh' spam is about), run your browser inside of a virtual machine, with no shares, if you're truly paranoid about this threat. Linux is small, lightweight, and runs Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Seamonkey and all manner of other, more obscure browsers. Lightweight and runs great in a VM. The VM can even auto-revert to a known state each time it is used.
Malware such as that mentioned in this article targets the mainstream OSs and the mainstream browsers for those OSs. It will generally NOT have any means to crawl out of a plain old VM's sandbox.
Windows/IE will always be the primary target. The most, and most clueless users.
Mac OSX+Safari will be a a secondary or tertiary target.
Android, off-market? Maybe. iOS? Too locked down, and Android will have the numbers. Win8 Phone? Well, this is where compatibility undoes them. If it can trivially be recompiled and ported, the malware will go straight there, too.
Anything else will probably never be targeted. No return on the investment. Linux will remain pretty safe, forever, let alone against any Linux+VM combinations. Too many kinds of Linux.
Disable any 'middleware', like Java or Flash. Enable them selectively, only as desired.
It's hard to 'ransom' what you can trivially restore. In other words, this only underlines the vast quantities of FOOLS who have no backup.
Hint: The FBI, along with local police will come visit you IN PERSON to take away systems and software, if you violate any laws. A SWAT team with a warrant, no less. They don't 'notify' you that you're committing crimes. They come to get you.
Fines/tickets are always done through snail mail or messengers.
Secure, secret, off-site backup is recommended if interaction with law enforcement is ever a possibility. If they come to take your stuff, you will probably never see any of it again, and if you do, not for years and years.
As for a secure sandbox (what the 'makaseh' spam is about), run your browser inside of a virtual machine, with no shares, if you're truly paranoid about this threat. Linux is small, lightweight, and runs Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Seamonkey and all manner of other, more obscure browsers. Lightweight and runs great in a VM. The VM can even auto-revert to a known state each time it is used.
Malware such as that mentioned in this article targets the mainstream OSs and the mainstream browsers for those OSs. It will generally NOT have any means to crawl out of a plain old VM's sandbox.
Windows/IE will always be the primary target. The most, and most clueless users.
Mac OSX+Safari will be a a secondary or tertiary target.
Android, off-market? Maybe. iOS? Too locked down, and Android will have the numbers. Win8 Phone? Well, this is where compatibility undoes them. If it can trivially be recompiled and ported, the malware will go straight there, too.
Anything else will probably never be targeted. No return on the investment. Linux will remain pretty safe, forever, let alone against any Linux+VM combinations. Too many kinds of Linux.
Disable any 'middleware', like Java or Flash. Enable them selectively, only as desired.
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