If Japan is any indication, multiple tentacles are usually followed by bukkake.

If I'm remembering my astronomy correctly, first generation stars were much larger and faster rotating, but also much shorter-lived in general - some had lifespans possibly as short as a few million years.

If there's no expectation of privacy on public roads, then why do people get freaked out if they notice someone following them? There is some expectation of privacy on public roads, especially as you move away from cities.

I bet they have a GPS tracker on that bus you're on too! They know exactly where it's going.

A proper data backup plan will prevent crippling devastation, but to say "not seriously affected" is somewhat ignorant. On a large network, it can take significant time to restore all affected files - especially if you need to bring in your offsite backups like we did because it wasn't detected until that set had been moved to our other location. In the meantime, we had hundreds of users calling in and complaining they couldn't access many files. We didn't want to do a blanket restore because that would wipe out many changes to unaffected files.

TL;DR: A proper backup plan is a storm cellar in a tornado. It keeps you alive, but there's still significant resources invested in clean-up.

That seems unlikely, as this vendor has a long-term support contract with us and gained nothing extra from giving us help with it. But make sure you know who you can trust ahead of time.

It requires the user to run it in the first place, usually as an email attachment. And users have long since been conditioned to click Yes/Run/Continue on every pop-up box that gets between them and their perceived goal. As annoying as it is, I like the things that ask "Block? Yes/No" rather than "Allow? Yes/No" because it helps stop some of this click-yes-without-reading behavior.

The bright side of CryptoLocker's registry access is that it leaves a list of every file that it hit, which helped a lot when restoring from backups as we didn't need to test or restore absolutely every file.

One issue is that it doesn't just affect the infected machine, but also every mapped drive. Reinstalling all of those systems would have been a nightmare's worth of downtime. Unfortunately, most of the mapped drives are a result of legacy systems with very finicky requirements that we can't move off of yet for one reason or another. I agree, your access control system would be nice (although I imagine the initial implementations would be a minor nightmare as proprietary apps try to lock out other programs that could otherwise read that data).

We got hammered by CryptoLocker twice in November. Unfortunately, the backups of one of our affected fileservers crashed the same day, but we still lost very little data (none critical). The worst part is that it hits every mapped drive that the user has write-access to, and some of our legacy accounting and payroll systems require exactly those permissions. It's a real eye-opener, but what really gets you going is when you realize that CryptoLocker is actually pretty tame compared to what it could be - it only targets certain extensions, is easy to remove, is easy to block, and doesn't touch Windows.

Get this labeled as "cyber-terrorism" (which is basically is) and they'll be all over it.

I can't tell if you're a troll or just an average AC....

We got hit by CryptoLocker twice back in November (in one case, it wreaked havoc on network shares because the user had way more permissions than necessary due to office politics). We didn't pay the ransom, but we worked with a vendor who was very familiar with CryptoLocker. According to them, every time people paid, they got the key as promised.

Maybe you should have it with an Apple strudel

Which, by my calculations, is still under copyright for another 30 years anyway (released 1973).

He puts his hear to the ground and listens for the distant stampede of electrons running through Cat5. For more interactive browsing, he fires up a faulty power supply to make smoke signals.