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Letter: Defeating ransomware would be easy, if only...

Published 31 July 2019

From Hillary J. Shaw, Newport, Shropshire, UK

Chris Stokel-Walker reports that ransomware attacks are on the rise (13 July, p 9). Surely these can almost always be defeated by backing up all data securely to a computer that has no internet access? Can’t we design software that will do this automatically, as often as every 5 minutes if necessary? Its users would only lose data changed since the last backup. The sole expense would be that of a quarantined backup computer and the power to run it. That has to be cheaper than a bitcoin ransom.

Issue no. 3241 published 3 August 2019

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