The poor IT guys there probably asked for a couple thousand for backups instead and were previously denied. Ransomeware first rose to prominence three years ago.
Yet seemingly little has been learned?
Yet seemingly little has been learned?
I stopped using my email address between transcript requests because the whole student/faculty directory is rampant with student employees of local businesses sending spam within the system.
A permanent link is a complete mystery of a concept to them as well. Every time sun shines on an article in public media for them the glory is sure to be short lived, because google's link will be broken in 6 months tops.
I am baffled that universities (and so many others) don't just use WordPress for publishing their media.
[0]: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-extortion-economy-how...
Simple "common sense" solutions are pretty close to useless in these scenarios since they provide no meaningful impediment to halfway competent attackers. They stop children and script kiddies which is helpful in that there are a lot more of them, but essentially every actual economically-motivated attack remains viable.
To provide an analogy, the fence around a military base does good work stopping people from just walking onto base, but it does not stop the enemy tanks. That does not mean the fence is useless, it stops one kind of threat, but if tanks might actually attack the base you either need to have a way to stop them or be willing to take the loss. Throwing up more fences so it takes longer for the tanks to roll over all of them is not really meaningful if losing the base is still an unacceptable loss.
Of course, it depends how much data you're backing up.