(Holly is back behind the bar at Willow after an absence to pursue other opportunities. She is posing with the salt and pepper grinder that we regulars at the bar believe is more useful- and talented- than NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. Photo Socotra).

Sorry about dwelling on the astonishing nature of the threats to our daily life- I am working on a project that has caused me to turn my attention to some of the frankly weird stuff that is going on. I was going to tell you about the triumphant return of Holly the bartender to Willow, and the guy with the green hair. I think you would have been interested.

Maybe I will get to that later this long weekend.

Electromagnetic threats such as the one we talked about yesterday are the extreme end of some really bad stuff, but there is more that is going on in the box in front of which you are sitting.

I have let the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) thing kind of slide by. I just assume all my personal information is in the possession of the Chinese, among others, and I have adopted a defensive position. For my pals who send links to interesting articles, I am not going to open them unless you take a second to explain what there are about.

Sorry. I will let you know more about that in a minute. It is just simple self-defense.

But as to the OPM breach, 22.1 million of us were compromised, big time, and the Administration is just getting around to issuing the contract to make everything better. OPM and the Defense Department are going to pay $350 million of our tax dollars to “provide credit monitoring, identity monitoring, identity theft insurance, and identity restoration services to those who had their information stolen.”

According to The Hill, the contract went to an outfit called “Identity Theft Guard Solutions,” also known as ID Experts. I certainly hope someone is, besides the Chinese, North Koreans and the Russkies, and I am sure Secretary Clinton is with me in that sentiment.

We aren’t going to know for sure if we were had until
November, which will mark four months since OPM finally fessed up to the size of the compromise.

Not having formal notification permitted me to return to living in the fool’s paradise where I normally live. I have no idea what the Chinese are going to do with the information they stole, but you can bet it is going to be subtle and awful. Meanwhile, there is some other crap going on in the digital world that you ought to be aware of.

I got this note from a pal yesterday, and it brought me up short. Here is what it said:

“Vic,
I have lost everything….. all my documents, all my spreadsheets, tax returns, and all my photos…. My photos of my family’s history, my travels, my cats….

I feel like I lost my life…. And feel so very sad. My heart is heavy… it actually hurt last night when I went to bed and tossed and turned. What a lesson about the need to back-up, even if you think you’re engaging in “safe” practices!

After the IT experts work on my builder’s computer network, I’ll call him to schedule an appointment for him to come here….. I think the malware has been cleaned out, but it left destruction behind, and everything I’ve researched on the internet says this virus’ effects (it’s the CryptoWall 3.0) and cannot be reversed.

Here is a link to an article that describes what happened.

I got the Ransom virus in an attachment my home-builder sent. I was expecting an attachment, so I opened it, and that launched the Ransom-ware. Our builder uses cloud for their back-up (weekly), but the virus infected all of their computers, and they lost everything that wasn’t backed up “this week”. They thought they had a very strong IT security system, with a full-time IT person, and had many safeguards in place. However, their security system didn’t catch the virus until I called to tell them we had a problem. AVG didn’t catch the virus on my computer.

It’s interesting (scary, really!) how this came about. The Builder had advertised for a vacancy and has been receiving e-mails with resumes attached. The virus was launched in their system when they received an e-mail with a “Resume” attached, and opened it. The virus then seeks out e-mail addresses used in the last year, and sends out more viruses.

The e-mail I opened came from the Office Manager at the builder’s office (and I deal a lot with her on invoices, change orders, etc.), and attached was something titled “Fax copy” or something like that. I was expecting an item from her I could print, so it never occurred to me that this could be a problem and I opened it.

If I had back-ups of everything, then it would “just” be the hassle of running several scans to eliminate the Ransom-ware. My disaster was caused because I never backed anything up.

I was up until past midnight last night running 2 sets of scans to remove the malware. But there’s nothing left in my files. The titles are there, but when you click on the title, there’s nothing.

I’m hoping the Builder’s IT expert can help me out and recover some of my files, but all reports on the internet are not encouraging.

What bastards these cyber criminals are! Of course, you’ve been saying that for months…”

I have been saying that for months. I don’t even keep paper copies of all the stuff I blather on about, and am meaning to get around to compiling things one of these days. I am currently running a Seagate external hard drive with a 1 Terabyte capacity. It makes swapping out computers a breeze, and could protect me from some of the problems associated with the assorted malware being disseminated these days.

It isn’t a question of “if” any more. Even the most cautious user is going to get nailed eventually, and all I can say is that I agree with my pal. They are bastards, and they are no-shit out to get us.

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303