This week’s ransomware attack against San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency underscores just how real the events in my Cyber War I novel are.  My soon-to-be-released story is fictional of course, but I didn’t make this stuff up. These attacks I describe are literally off the front pages.  This attack requested 100 bitcoin, roughly $70,000, to free their ticketing systems.

I mirror another true story from last year where a hospital was attacked, requesting a similar ransom.  My story details this attack vector and how you might recover from an attack.  Hint, backup your system, preferably offsite.  While farfetched, you might even get lucky and find your files still unencrypted in your trash bin.  It doesn’t hurt to look.

Hope you appreciate this small computer security primer.  It’s really a thinly-veiled attempt at self-promotion for my book.  I’m in the marketing phase of book writing and publication.  If I were serious about it, I’d have started marketing more aggressively months earlier.  And I’m too cheap, or just not committed enough, to drop 100s if not 1000s of dollars into book promotion – so I am leveraging my blog.  Hoping my book will be available by end of week.