FrankForum (Frankness IS Forum)

Among the many threats to your computer, one is called 'ransomware', a type of program which can insert itself into your machine and then ENCRYPT the data on it, so you cannot access your own machine. Then you get a notice to PAY money in order to get the decryption key.

Obviously this is one of a billion reasons why you should be careful where you surf, what emails you open, and backup your data daily. Learn to clone, too, as often only a clone of your drive can get you up and running when Windows tanks.

So: bleepingcomputer.com has a number of really gifted computer guys who help folks out. One of their primary specialties is ransomware. So click here for the latest article on it, and feel free to go over there and ask questions. I tried to offer them money as a donation, and they wouldn't take it.

We have a lot of clients who occasionally get hit by cryptowall / cryptolocker (and potentially other variants).

There's three methods around this:
#1 using backups to restore the data
#2 if the client doesn't have backups (which ALL businesses should have!!!) either using shadow copies if available (which are *not* technically 'backups')
#3 if "cryptolocker" specifically hits the data and there are no other options, various security firms have designed a decryption tool for it

I know some businesses will pay to attempt to decrypt the data, but we always advise against it since... there's no guarantee it works. And, if any of our clients refuse backups they're not a 'right client' for us--we don't do business with them. There are businesses that don't take data security seriously, and would rather be cheap and use their I.T. provider as a liability and yell at them when something goes wrong.

Good points. I have a hard time understanding why people want to scrimp on IT. There are useful versus needless things, but that's not scrimping. That's being smart.

#1 Money
#2 Poor leaders

But your question is probably, you have a hard time understanding how businesses WHO HAVE MONEY, still insist on penny pinching critical I.T. infrastructure. Well I have two answers for you:
===The first is that they honestly don't understand how computers and I.T. works, so they think it's not necessary and assume they're just being led on-- hey if nothing bad has happened so far, they won't feel a need to change. And if something bad does happen then they just blame the I.T. provider despite the I.T. provider telling them over and over *sigh*
===The other being outright greed where they would rather spend more money during a critical outage that spending less proactively; lacking the intuition to precalculate cost saving in the long run.