Protect yourself from ransomware with a Carbon Copy Cloner backup
Recently Palo Alto Networks reported a "ransomware" threat to Mac users named "KeRanger". After reading their analysis I found myself deeply concerned. Ransomware threats are nothing new, but I realized that this is probably the closest I've felt to the seedy world of cyber terrorism. Up until now all of that seemed to be aimed at governments, defense departments, big corporations... Windows users! Here we are, though, it's at our doorstep, and our neighbors are already victims. I received an email from a CCC customer yesterday that started with:
I happen to be one of the people who got hit with the ransomware hacks.
Yikes! I was not expecting a good outcome here. Thankfully, the rest of the email was:
Luckily I had a CCC of my drive and booted off that, deleted the ransomware files and was fine.
While this threat appears to be mostly contained at the moment, I think everybody should take some time to examine their defenses against this sort of attack. Having a backup is an obvious first step, but there are some additional steps that you can take to protect your backup too.
Protect yourself from ransomware
This particular...