Back Ups of Back Ups

It is probably the coldest morning of this winter so far this morning.  My not so accurate thermometre was telling me it was 5° in the backyard this morning, whereas the local weather said it was 3°.  3 was probably the closest.

Around  10 am this morning the Blue-tooth Speaker I ordered was delivered.  It was usually priced at $149 but had been reduced to $27 delivered.  I don't use this sort of stuff very much at all but at such a discount it was just too good to pass up.  It is a fully portable speaker and you can play music or any audio streamed from your phone or tablet so it can be heard by everyone.  It will be possibly handy when everyone is outside and you want some music or something in the background.

People tend to have a go at me whenever I buy yet another external hard disk drive.  I have a couple of external hard drives and keep backups of my backups!  I backup heaps of stuff just to make sure if something goes amiss, it is straight forward to get it all back again.

Trish is doing a beading demonstration for her group at Stitchers.  She has been to several local shops to buy stuff and also to Polly's Beads, an online store for some things.  She expected the delivery yesterday but as far as I know, it has been delayed.

When I quickly checked my emails this morning there was one from auspost saying no one had been home when they tried to deliver a parcel yesterday.  I immediately thought of Polly's Beads.  All the instructions to collect the package were on the attached .pdf document.  I downloaded the document and clicked on the link provided!  Suddenly my anti-virus started going berserk!  I had been duped!

I deleted as many 'intrusions' as I could as well as the offending email and turned off the PC.  Upon restart I saw many of my documents and videos now had a different extension name, mainly that they were now encrypted or locked and I was unable to open them!  I couldn't open any of them, many documents, photos, and videos.  There was a message with each file giving information on how they may be decrypted and a link to a website.

To cut a long story short, they wanted $640 AUD to provide me with a key to unlock them all.

I don't write a lot of documents on a day by day basis but I do update them weekly.  When I get a new movie or TV show, it gets uploaded immediately to the hard drive on the media-player in the lounge room.  I tend to back-up these new movies every other day to my back-up drives.

Within an hour all the encrypted files had been deleted and replaced with 'clean' files from the backup drives.  Upon restart, those files remained OK and able to be read.  So the encrypting part part of the problem had only been active following the initial attack.  I ran my anti-virus and did a full scan which came back clean as well!

All appears to have returned to normal now, both with the computer and with my stress level.

We finished watching a TV Series called "The Syndicate" and enjoyed it very much.  It was 6 x 1hour episodes, we watched 5 episodes last night.

I had a return appointment with the Ear Nose and Throat Surgeon yesterday for my "Glue Ear".  It has now fully recovered which was good news to get.