eBay

sin-n-dex · ‎12-24-2018

So I'm going to share a story from my professional life about a ransomware (virus) attack.

I work for a multi-billion dollar company in their legal department.

A week ago someone in one of our departments received an email with a .docx attachment from what appeared to be a law firm that we have an existing relationship with. He opened the attachment (and I'm filling in the blanks here because I've received these viruses before), was asked to activate macros to see the content of the message.

He found out quickly it was a virus, notified our IT department (who circulated messages with screen caps of the encrypted drive to everyone in the company asking us not to attempt to open any of these encrypted files). The ransomware virus encrypted the majority of this department's files.

IT backs up, but not all drives are backed up frequently... the most recent restore point these documents was November 22. Everything after that was lost. Also some of their documents weren't salvageable and ended up being deleted. (I know this because I helped restore anything I was working on that I had backed up myself).

So if a billion dollar company can suffer this... so can any of us. Back up your documents on an external hard drive or a USB Stick.

Think how long did we put into making our listings, taking photos, writing descriptions, and all our personal stuff. I back up on external drive (but admittedly maybe not as often as I should). The help files that were sent by IT suggested using cloud servers to back up personal photos.

Just an FYI...

duncanvr · ‎12-24-2018

Sorry to hear that I back up all files and eBay files on an external drive regularily, then onto another external hard drive. Then I email from one of my emails all important documents to my Yahoo email. If anything Yahoo will have everything stored forever. I also use anti ransomeware software which everyone should have these days. I also would point out one should back up all browser web links as well. I'm a PC tech I know how bad it is when you get a virus. Or if your main hard drive dies you could loose everything. I need eBay up and running as soon as possible should any PC problems arrise. One thing I suggest is a fast powerful PC to run eBay, and great software to protect it. And a back up PC. One needs more than just antivirus these days.

totoro470 · ‎12-24-2018

Thanks for the story and heads up.

For me, I think the biggest threat from hackers (for carfeul folks) is when corporations get hacked and lose all our information. I've always been extremely paranoid and careful and haven't had any issues in 20 years but it feels like every year some other company loses all of our personal/payment information and just says "whoops." My own state (SC) lost millions of financial records in a hack a few years ago. They simply gave us a few months of insurance to cover something that can have life long effects. Same for (dunno if I can say the name, starts with an "E," ends with an "x"), they're still in business despite knowing months ahead of time that they lost millions of people's personal info. There's also a few ironic cases where well known antivirus companies got hacked and gave back doors to millions of computers.

It's a really scary world out there. Luckily, the best thing most of us have going for us is that we're not big enough or easy enough of targets to be worth the trouble.

fsdfasdf-0 · ‎12-24-2018

The scripts aren't a threat to me.

Hard drive failure is.

The real problem however, is finding an automated method that backs up all data on a schedule, automatically...

Oh, you think it's easy?

The hard drive crashes at 2am but it's not enough of a crash to lock up the system...

At 4am the backup method runs and backs up everything post-crash, overwriting the good backed up data with corrupted media.

Just one example of how that goes...

I have found for myself, it's best to become well-versed in recovery methods.

Even then there's no way to completely prevent a catastrophic failure.

You can, however, almost always "extract" data files (Music, pictures, documents, everything except executables) from an old drive and transfer those to the new one, then reinstall software.

Never backup or restore software, that's dangerous, always install software itself fresh.

Only the data...

I have several CD-Roms (DVD's actually) laying around with complete Operating Systems on them so I can boot from those when the hard-drive crashes. These DVD's are specifically geared towards recovery, the software they contain are made for the purpose. Even then...

sin-n-dex · ‎12-25-2018

@duncanvr wrote:
Sorry to hear that I back up all files and eBay files on an external drive regularily, then onto another external hard drive. Then I email from one of my emails all important documents to my Yahoo email. If anything Yahoo will have everything stored forever. I also use anti ransomeware software which everyone should have these days. I also would point out one should back up all browser web links as well. I'm a PC tech I know how bad it is when you get a virus. Or if your main hard drive dies you could loose everything. I need eBay up and running as soon as possible should any PC problems arrise. One thing I suggest is a fast powerful PC to run eBay, and great software to protect it. And a back up PC. One needs more than just antivirus these days.

At work, we have a number of shared drives (it was only my department's drive that was affected), but the guy who opened the virus lost items on his personal drive (the partition they give us that isn't shared with the rest of the department, so many of us have some personal things there... although I don't recommend that). He said he lost all his web links as well.

I used to have issues with managers at work for backing up shared files onto a key for my own personal use (I'm talking about the template of a formal letter, or forms, or something generic that I will use many times). I always did this because some fool would save the template with changes and our copy would be lost... so I made back ups. Good thing I did, everything I was working on was restored to date.

Cheers, C.