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ricg | 4 years ago
Are you worried about data security/malware at all? How do you protect your data?
Maybe I listened to too many Darknet Diaries episodes, but recently I've been thinking more about how to protect my personal digital documents. All it takes is one bad link or fishing email. Once a virus/trojan/ransomware is on the system, the attacker has a lot of leverage with everything scanned and neatly filed.
My idea is to use a separate laptop for archiving digital documents that is never connected to the Internet. Still a thought experiment at this point so I can't speak to the practicality (backups, etc.) of this yet.
tjansen|4 years ago
Not really. I scan everything I get on paper, and put everything on Google Drive.
But it would be quite a lot of effort to dig through my hundreds (thousands?) of PDF documents that I have on that drive, and to find something that can actually be exploited and is worth more than what an attacker could get by just having access to my computer. An attacker can get my credit card numbers when I shop online, access to bank accounts when I am using online banking, get all my tax data when I file income taxes... I think that's far worse than anything that can be found on my Google Drive.
So I think having a separate laptop is overkill, unless you have something that's really more at risk than the data on the internet-connected computer.
ricg|4 years ago
That's what I was referring to. Let's assume you store your scanned PDFs on your personal laptop and that gets compromised. Now the attacker has your medical history, tax and bank statements, contracts, ... your whole life to pick and choose the ransom amount.
I'm getting more and more to the conclusion that if you do not want something to be published on the Internet, do not put it on an Internet-connected device, smartphone or laptop -- or put the other way around: "expect anything that you keep on an Internet connected device (or cloud) to be potentially stolen from you". Too paranoid?
softwarebeware|4 years ago