Comic and a bit of philosophy

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal for Friday, February 25, 2022

• How do you stop being jealous of other people?
• The key is to always do what is true to you. Find your highest ideal and pursue it.
  Then, when other people have more success, you can recast your failure as a heroic struggle for purity or beauty or whatever.

This comic, which portrays a very cynical view of the world (a common feature of comics by its author), calls to mind a very famous quote from the Talmud (Pirkei Avot, aka "Ethics of the Fathers", Chapter 4, mishna 1):

Computer Weekly: Backups ‘no longer effective’ for stopping ransomware attacks

Backups ‘no longer effective’ for stopping ransomware attacks
By Alex Scroxton. 23 Feb 2022 14:00

...
Data collated from Venafi’s worldwide survey of IT and security decision-makers reveal that 83% of successful ransomware attacks now involve alternative extortion methods – for example, using stolen data to extort customers (38%), leaking data to the dark web (35%), and informing customers that their data has been compromised (32%). A mere 17% of attacks merely ask for money for a decryption key.
...
Venafi also found that cyber criminals are increasingly following through on their threats whether or not they get paid. Indeed, 18% of victims had their data leaked despite paying, while more than the 16% who refused outright to pay anything and had their data leaked. Some 8% refused outright, but then had their customers extorted; and 35% paid, but were left hanging, unable to retrieve their data.

In other words, if you are victim of a ransomware attack, you're screwed no matter what you do. Even if you pay up, there's a good chance you won't get your data back and your confidential data may still be published.

So, (desptie the article's headline), the best you can hope for is to get yourself operational by restoring from a backup (be sure to retain several, in case your most recent one was corrupted by the attack), and don't pay the ransom.