Round 51, Hour 1

[lolmac]

Welcome to Area 51!

Please line up single file to pass the security checkpoint.  Be prepared to show your credentials to the little grey guy with the great big eyes security officer.

Comments

[sid]

Pssst. Is the password still SWORDFISH? Or will it be AlienFish this round?

I'm asking for a friend who forgot her credentials. Not me. I absolutely have mine.

I absolutely have stuff to write, too. It's kind of dim in here, though, with just those glowst... Are you positive those are glowsticks?

[lolmac]

YES THEY ARE GLOWSTICKS. Funny shaped glowsticks. Funny shaped moving glowsticks. With teeth. Don't worry about the teeth. They're vegetarian.

[sid]

*looks at glowsticks askance*

*glowsticks look askance back*

Okaaaaay.

Hey, I've finished something already! :-D I just proofread a short something I wrote a few days back, changed two words, and did some quick research to verify I was using a military term correctly.

Now to email it off and open up the doc for my next project.

[clocketpatch]

Greetings! The goal of the first hour is to finish a take-home project from work. Then maybe work can continue on Unconventional Courtships

[lolmac]

Yay hurrah!

I'm actually trying to do something for Unconventional Courtship, but it's so nebulous I didn't dare sign up. I just stole one of the summaries.

[xandromedovna.livejournal.com]

hello? I seem to have stumbled into the Area 52 theatre by mistake... oh well, might as well stay and watch the play for a few hours

[lolmac]

If you're in the Area 52 theatre, you ought to have some REALLY interesting scenes in that play. Ahem.

[sara-lakali.livejournal.com]

Checking in. Credentials? Sure. *waves union card quickly at security officer*

[lolmac]

Excuse me, miss, was that a union card or an onion card? If it's an onion card, please take it to the buffet.

Also, welcome! I think this is your first round, correct?

[sara-lakali.livejournal.com]

Yes it is. :D

[lolmac]

Hurrah! What are you working on?

[sara-lakali.livejournal.com]

Three WIPs for fests that are due no later than the 15th of next month.

[lolmac]

Ooo, best of luck!

[eve11]

I have stored my phone in the cubby, buzzed my card and entered my four-digit code to get to the office floor, checked that the blue lights weren't flashing, unlocked the office door, started up my computer, inserted my CAC card with biometric identity and PKI credentials, logged on, entered my sixteen-digit password, SSH-ed into the required network, entered my sixteen digit password again, and am ready to go!

Ha, well what Round 51 is making me want to do is work on my fic that is set in Area 51.

I have a bunch of RL stuff to do tomorrow though: but hopefully I can get some words down tonight.

[lolmac]

If you went ssh into the network, it should hum along softly without bothering anyone.

Writing Area 51 fic would be elegantly perfect!

[laurie-ky.livejournal.com]

I was babysitting the toddler, who now has a superhero identity. He is Goofyboy, and his superpower is (ta da) being goofy and wild. He's gone home now, after a satisfying day of picking up sticks and whacking at stuff. I want to know where on the Y chromosome the gene for swordfighting is located.

Anyway, I doubt I get much done at all, since we're going out of town tomorrow and won't be back till probably late Sunday afternoon.

I lost 15,000 words on one story and about a fourth of another story due to my files being hacked and encrypted. I refuse to pay the ransom of 500 dollars, so I'm rewriting what I lost.

Laurie

[lolmac]

AUGH CRYPTOLOCKER!! I'm so sorry.

Do you have System Protection turned on now? That's the only real protection I know of against ransomware. Paying the ransom rarely works, even if you can afford it -- the Bad Guys have a horrible track record of never sending the decryption keys, or just making a new demand.

[laurie-ky.livejournal.com]

I have McAfee. Is that what you mean? And I wouldn't pay even if I had oodles of money to spare, because, just no. You should see the ransom notes they left in my file folders. Brazen, the lot of them.

Laurie

[lolmac]

System Protection is built in to Windows -- in fact, if you already had it on in the background, you may be able to recover some of your files. It's the part of the OS that generates System Restore points. Have you already tried using this?

If you're not sure, when you're awake and online, ping me and I'll cheerfully deluge you with instructions. I loathe ransomware even more than I loathe other kinds of malware.

Also, unless you actually paid for your McAfee subscription, I can recommend a much better free antivirus AND a free anti-malware. (If you did pay for it, I can recommend the anti-malware anyway.)

[laurie-ky.livejournal.com]

I've got McAfee for three years. I also have a free version of Ad-Aware, that caught some infected files on my email.

I looked up system protection, and I don't think it's going to help. I didn't make an image file and Windows itself seems fine. It doesn't seem useful to reinstall it. Where I really slipped up was in not having adequate backup. I had procrastinated setting up my 3T external hard drive I gave myself for Christmas because I wanted to go through my files first and delete a lot of stuff I didn't need and organize the rest into folders. The hard drive I did have for backup was out of space after doing one backup and I didn't delete it and do another one that was more recent. I was able to get some files I wanted from it. I thought I had an online backup to protect my document files on the stories I was writing, but alas. It was a freebie that I didn't know had expired, since it regularly popped up a message saying that it had backed up my files.

So, I think I'm shit out of luck. I'd be very appreciative of the recs on anti-malware and the antivirus program.

Now I'm emailing my story docs to myself each night, and my 3T hard drive is set up and I've got some things stored at Amazon in the cloud.

Karma kicked my ass on this one. Thanks for everything.

Laurie

[lolmac]

Finally getting back to you on this: what you're looking for is System Restore. Are you using Windows 7 or XP?

Windows usually creates a Restore Point each time it applies major updates, and at various other times. System Protection, when fully activated, will create one more often. Creating a daily Restore Point is the best protection against ransomware, but less frequent restore points will help.)

Using System Restore isn't the same as uninstalling and reinstalling. It rolls the computer back to the designated point -- which will reset the hijacked and encrypted section of the hard drive to its unencrypted state. It will cause installed programs and patches to uninstall (or, rather, to not yet have been installed), but should not make documents retroactively cease to exist. You have to be ready, after doing a restore for this purpose, to isolate the computer and clean out the infection, which may be lurking in its pre-triggered form.

The first step is to open up System Restore and check for Restore Points. If you apply updates and patches regularly, there should be several available.

So my suggestion is: on the affected computer, check for restore points. In Windows 7, the quickest way is to type "System Restore" into the Search box in the Start menu.

Let me know how it goes!

[laurie-ky.livejournal.com]

I'm shit out of luck. Maybe if I had done this earlier, or understood about it, but the last restore point in 4-19-14 and I was hacked on 4-11-14. As I understand it, there isn't anything to go back to before they encrypted my files.

Thanks for letting me know. If this happens again, I'll give it a try. I talked to a friend who's an IT guy, when it happened, but he didn't mention trying this. Maybe it's one of those things where it seems obvious to the person who's knowledgeable and they don't realize it's over other people's heads.

Laurie

[lolmac]

Not quite following -- do you mean 4/19/14 is the earliest restore point? If you're in Windows 7, there will be a check box offering to show you earlier restore points.

If it's just plain no go, then to guard yourself for the future: get the computer scrubbed, so you won't turn up with another round from a latent infection; then go into System Protection, make sure it's enabled for all disk partitions, and increase the amount of disk space alloted for restore points. Then open the Task Scheduler and set the computer to create a restore point daily. (It's called "SR" in the Task Library.) On my own computer, I have it set to run at system startup and at 3 am, and it's set to run whether the computer is idle or not (I had to tinker a lot before I found out this was essential on my system).

If this is all clear as mud, bonk me on the head and tell me to speak English. It's late enough here that I may be typing gibberish without realizing it properly.

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

Hey...I thought we were doing 52? Oh yeah...we aren't acknowledging the alien incursion...*nods*

[lolmac]

We get to spend next month at Area 52, which should be a slashy good time indeed.

(BTW, we're now on the Hour 2 post, and Hour 3 will go up in a few more minutes.)