Really? You lost your safety the moment you turned on your device to post on MR. Please stay in the know about the internet.
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OS X Users Hit by Ransomware Websites Posing as FBI Notices
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Really? You lost your safety the moment you turned on your device to post on MR. Please stay in the know about the internet.
All it takes is a handful of bozos to make it a worthwhile investment to the scammers. Say 1 in 1000 people fall for it (and you know there's more idiots out there than that). That's an easy $30,000 if only 100,000 people load the website.
We can also assume that a fairly large portion of visitors will have at least a few gigs of pr0n on their hard drives and live in a constant state of fear that their wives will find it. How many of these bozos will run to the gas station to pay the money before their wives get home and see the FBI warning? How many wives will believe it's a scam and not the real deal? It won't help that in most cases their husbands really are pr0n hounds but the scam is unrelated to that fact.
To paraphrase George Carlin: "imagine the intelligence of the average Joe. Half of 'em are stupider!"
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lol George Carlin is right though. It's pure statistics. Average means better than half, and worse than half. Some might interpret it as misanthropy but hes got logic to back him up (just like most of his sayings).
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Maybe not but java and flash are a million times more vulnerable to attacks, which is wht he's commenting about probably.
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lol George Carlin is right though. It's pure statistics. Average means better than half, and worse than half. Some might interpret it as misanthropy but hes got logic to back him up (just like most of his sayings).
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Maybe not but java and flash are a million times more vulnerable to attacks, which is wht he's commenting about probably.
I think he meant Javascript...which is how this ransomware works.
Without JS the internet would be.....boring
When family members get this, I just run system restore on windows and it works. I wish Apple had something like system restore without having to use Time Machine to restore the machine.
Quite Safari, then hold SHIFT when re-opening it
not sure if this was mentioned, didn't see it in the first 50 or so posts bemoaning the "open windows from last session" feature. holding SHIFT when opening Safari kills your old session dead and opens to a blank slate.
Oops, I meant "quit" Safari.
not sure if this was mentioned, didn't see it in the first 50 or so posts bemoaning the "open windows from last session" feature. holding SHIFT when opening Safari kills your old session dead and opens to a blank slate.
Oops, I meant "quit" Safari.
You know I hate it when people say how others who may not be as tech savvy are "not smart enough" if they fall for it. I bet you both are "not so smart" with certain things as well. Do any of you know how to cook? I bet if you face off against Gordon Ramsay, you probably wouldn't feel so smart!
Please get off your high horses.
Which brings me to this...as said by a previous poster, JavaScript and Java are NOT the same thing.
I think it's safe to say you're more tech savvy than your typical person considering your frequent MacRumors. But at the same time, you don't know that JavaScript and Java are two completely different technologies.
This ransomeware thing uses JavaScript and not Java. So disabling Java wouldn't be pointless. So if you disabled Java and still got this ransomeware because you disabled the wrong thing, would you deserve it because you weren't "smart" enough?
All you smug people saying that you would NEVER fall for something like this, just know that any con artist will tell you that the absolute easiest marks are the people who think they're too smart to fall for a scam.
So, yet another reason to stay on SL - with javascript disabled!
BTW, who the heck is Taylor Swift?
BTW, who the heck is Taylor Swift?
To paraphrase my maths teacher... If 30,000 people load the website, and one in thousand fall for it and pay $300, how much money does the scam make?
You don't understand, Windows is itself, malware, bloatware, virus, trojan, etc, etc, etc.
The key, as most IT people know is, back up the data. It's easier to rebuild a pc from scratch than trying to disinfect it, if its in the condition you're describing above. IMO.
From a consumer perspective, you're absolutely right. Unfortunately it's simply not viable for our end-users where I work. Allow me to quickly elaborate; we try to have the systems future-proofed for events like this. We have the computer partitioned into two sections; one for the C: drive that contains all the information, programs and one for the D: drive that has the user folder.
This means that we can restore the C: drive in the event of a virus, and the computer's back to new within a few minutes, negating any data loss in the D: drive (user folder). However, even trying that with this virus doesn't work, because it's also littered in %programdata%, %appdata% it propagates from both user folder and root folders.
But wiping the computer and starting again isn't a good option. It means updating all the drivers again, restoring old backups, fully updating Windows -- and doing all of this remotely/talking someone through how to do it? No thanks, I don't even want to take that challenge on myself. Plus we can't just get the system collected for a non-hardware problem, because if we did that in the event of every tough Windows virus we'd be broke in a week.
I **********g hate PCs
People get scammed almost every day with the old "lottery ticket trick", showing how greedy and naive people are.
He's writing about how easy it is to get fooled by statistics.
In the example mentioned, numerous people are missing at least one arm, so the "average" number of arms is less than 2. Yet the vast majority of people, no doubt much greater than 99 percent, have two arms. If you tell the typical person that they're "above average," they will start to think they're special, even if they're not (as shown in this example).
haha, good one. the idead was really clever though, it'd easily fool most of us.
You clearly misunderstood the part where I'm talking about this article, having posted a picture of a Windows VM infected with trojans.
Trojans aren't social engineering like this "ransomware" is. Again, this is a browser based "attack" that relies on social engineering to gain profit. It's phishing 101. ANY browser on ANY OS can run into this website (and others like it) and get the lovely prompt spam. It's not even remotely comparable to trojans and worms.
Why is that hard to understand?
To all the folks who claim "Who falls for this stuff!!"...think about it like this. Picture someone you know who is of "average" intelligence. Then realize that 50% of the people in the world are dumber than that person.
There are some stupid people in this world, and yes, some of them own Macs.
There are some stupid people in this world, and yes, some of them own Macs.
Umm....this and other posts with these ignorant and ageist sentiments must be from Gen y readers.
I have been using computers since the first Mac SE and SE30. This is 25 odd years.
I am very computer/usenet/www savy as are most of my 60-70 year old friends. We all grew up with BBs and hypercard and when the web was invented we developed our own pages. IMHO the big advances over these years has been with hardware not software...