What can you do to protect your data? Every day, along comes another nasty piece of malware, aimed at ruining your life. It could be an attack on a cloud service where you have an account; only yesterday, Bitwarden told me that someone was trying to log into my account there. Fortunately, it’s protected with a hardware 2FA key.
There’s a wave of ransomware going around that gets you to download some malware, often pretending to be an update. It then starts its devious work, scrambling your precious files and demanding a fee, often paid in Bitcoin, to reverse the process. Despite calls for people to not pay, it is often the only route to getting your data back if you’ve been attacked and had insufficient processes in place to protect yourself.
So what can you do about it? Well, the first thing to realise is that data should never be on just one device. Especially if it’s a phone or laptop, which can inevitably be left on the back seat of a taxi.
When handling your data, the immediate requirement is to get a copy off the device on which it was created and onto something else. Or several other devices. Until the data has been copied over, it’s vulnerable to theft, malware, hardware failure, system crash or any of the other innumerable ways in which your data is no longer available to you.
However, this isn’t enough. Ignore, if necessary defriend, anyone who says that keeping your data in OneDrive, Dropbox or an equivalent cloud storage service is enough protection. It isn’t. And it’s obvious why this is. Let’s say you get some ransomware malware onto your computer. It scrambles your files. The next thing that will happen is that
