I’m not going to say I told you so. That would be childish, peurile, and beneath me.
However.
I have been helping, showing, and teaching people how to use computers for many years now – in fact, a good number of those reading this blog sent their first email under my tutelage.
And from the very earliest days of teaching email, I have pushed my three rules:
- Never open an email attachment unless you know the person who sent it.
- Never open an email attachment unless you trust the person who sent it.
- Never open an email attachment unless the person you know and trust tells you they sent it.
You can sum it up as ‘never open email attachments without a damned good reason’ if you want.
Yesterday, Channel 4 News led with a story about a massive new cyberattack. Many thousands of computers in the UK are infected with it, and many billions of pounds have been raked in by the people behind it.
The first you know about it, is when you get a message pop up on your screen telling you that your files have been encrypted. You want to see your files? Pay here, please.
The technical term is extortion (some call it blackmail, but I always thought that was ‘pay us or everybody can see your secrets’).
And can you guess what the experts advice was? Can you?
Yep. Don’t open attachments without a good reason.
For the record, if you get the encryption message, you have just two choices: pay them, or lose everything on your computer. There is no known method of decrypting the files without the key that they want you to buy. It’s only a few hundred pounds…
Personally, I’d just wipe the hard drive and start again: everything I care about is stored elsewhere. My photos, for instance, still exist in their original form on the camera’s memory card. (Cards, actually, I never delete the photos, I just replace the card.)
So. The official line: don’t open attachments. Exactly what I’ve been saying for years.
But I’m not going to say I told you so.
Oh… Isn’t that what I just said?