Tag cerber ransomware

So yesterday was not a fun one at the office. We had an employee contract the Cerber ransomware on her pc.  Ransomware has been around for a little while.  We had another user do the same thing a couple years ago.  This employee clicked on a link that was in an email that was sitting in her QUARANTINE folder.  The email was in quarantine for a reason, geezus.  After doing so the program quickly encrypted the majority of the files on her pc.  It did not stop there however.  It proceeded to also encrypt almost a quarter of a MILLION files on one of our network servers, knocking a couple of our important applications offline. When Cerber completed it popped a message on the desktop with instructions on how to pay the ransom for the decryption program to undo the damage..

Of course this was four alarm fire mode. I came up with a plan of action along with our programmer who maintains the applications that became corrupted. It consisted of a combination of restoring from our nightly back up and fixing a few corrupted files.  To me, paying the ransom was not an option.  Not only am I against it in principal, I have no trust in paying someone who just sabotaged me to undo the damage they did.  If anything I would expect it to compound the problem where the decryption program plants further malicious seeds on the machine, no thanks. In the end we had downtime in those applications of maybe a couple hours which was annoying but not the end of the world.  It was a wake up call to how vulnerable you can still be despite firewalls and other security measures if you have employees that are asleep at the wheel in terms of safe computing practices.

Last night Cindy’s daughter stopped by.  Of course we had to have her try out the Segway MiniPro.  In a span of 5 minutes she went from being shaky to comfortable.  Before she left she was zipping around the driveway with ease.   She shared Cindy and my opinion that the Segway is just a lot of fun.

Cindy and I saw a small portion of the RNC convention last night.  Wow it sounded pretty exciting with Dump Trump people getting shouted down, Colorado delegates refusing to sit in the arena, and the the Ohio governor, John Kasich refusing to attend, further reenforcing why I wish he somehow had the nomination instead.  We did not catch respected republican keynote speakers like Cha Chi (Scott Baio) or Antonio Sabato Jr, the hunk from General Hospital soap opera.

We did catch the speech from Melania Trump which made me laugh out loud repeatedly.  The hypocrisy of the anti-immigrant candidate’s Russian bride (Slovenia technically), reading a speech that evidently had large portions that were word for word from a past Michelle Obama speech was simply amazing.  It’s going to be a very entertaining week for sure. Merica rulez, the rest droolz! Hell yea!