SN 735: Makes Ya WannaCry

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All this ransomware makes me wanna cry. :tired_face::sob:

I’m with admiral Adama, we need to airgap all the things… or at least have regular cold storage backups.

All these affiliates and ransomeware activity is a bit like the golden age of piracy (sea piracy, not the copyright violation kind).

I can’t help feeling that we’re going to be forced to move to whitelisting safe apps and having an OS that won’t let random .EXE’s run… That should really slow down malware in general. Microsoft already has this option in Windows, but they’ve locked it behind the Enterprise subscription model.

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There is a setting in MacOS Gatekeeper that does the same thing, but the default is to allow users to do a little dance to open apps that aren’t notarized by Apple. This is a good compromise, because it allows me to download files from unknown sources but only if I know how.

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The closest thing we have to that for Windows 10 Home is S Mode, but that still allows you to install any apps from the Microsoft Store. That means that S Mode is only as secure as the apps in the Store. And judging by the quality of the apps in the Store, I am not confident that Microsoft is thoroughly vetting those apps.

Steve mentioned the Controlled Folder Access functionality in a previous episode. That is a solution for protecting your system from ransomware, but it can be an annoyance if you have a lot of legitimate apps that need write access to folders on your system. I’ve tried it myself before, and I had to turn it off because it just got too cumbersome to manage all of the apps that need write permissions.

I had Windows 10 S mode once. I hated it. You could not even install Chrome.

I tried the Surface Go right after it came out, before I ended up returning it. Granted, you could deactivate it and go to normal Windows. And I did.