Petya Ransomware hard drive Encryption.
Yet another devious ransomware is in the wild. This ransomware is now doing full hard drive encryption.
Why should this concern?
The ransomware is now doing full hard drive encryption that will actually stop you from even booting into windows.
This Youtube video shows the effects that a ransomware virus has on a PC
Mac devices are also not immune.
Do you backup?
Yet another reason that you should be backing up your important files to a device that is not connected to your PCMac via USB.
If you can afford it, then you should look at a backup solution that provides imaging of your PCMac and then allows a method to provide bare-metal restores.
Recovery!
The ransomware virus that fully encrypt hard drive so far have no way of recovery.
The only method is to format your drive and then do a full Windows installation and then restore your files.
If you were so unlucky to also have the ransomware that encrypted files, you could find that even your backup of those files on an external USB connected Hard Drive are encrypted.
Having a reliable backup solution that provides backups that are layered, as in multiple copies of your data, which can be recovered from a particular day is the only real protection.
Backup solutions, that just copy your files, will overwrite good files, with bad. You are then, once again, losing all of your data.
Remember that backup solutions that layer or keep multiple copies may not all be created equally, so will just increase your backup size and charge more. Most provide some level of optimisation, taking only the changed bits of data and storing that alongside an original. This is the most efficient version, as your usage increase much less over time.
Some cloud backup solution provides cost effective solutions for home users, but have limited capabilities, but sometimes, something is better than nothing. Others, like MirrorSphere Cloud Backup Solution provides enhanced capabilities, but is aimed purely at the business users.