The threat of hacking is constant. You need to be backing up your device. Your photos. Your files! Anything you don’t want to lose.
Backing up your device is easy! It’s also one of the easiest ways to save yourself from ransomware and all sorts of other nasty things, because it enables you to simply completely wipe the computer and start over without fearing the loss of your necessary files.
Now that digital storage is cheaper than it’s ever been, it’s a great time to learn. Windows will actually walk you through the process of backing up your personal device, and the only real pitfall is making sure you’ve got enough space on the drive you’re backing it up to. Using other apps, such as OneDrive, are also an option! This article goes over the choices available for PCs running recent versions of Windows: https://allthings.how/how-to-back-up-your-windows-11-pc/
And Mac: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102307
Aside from hacking or sudden hardware failure, there are other reasons you should be backing up your files regularly, and other places that need backing up as well. Google’s free account runs out at 15 GB. If you take a lot of photos or have a lot of Google Docs, that’s not that much space – and your emails will start bouncing if your mailbox fills up. However, backing up your photos offline will remove the need to store them in Google’s online backup, without cluttering your device! Windows 11 devices will even offer to import photos for you if you’re running Android. If not, the process is still relatively simple on the other major OS! On Mac, using something like iCloud makes things easier (as does OneDrive) but may involve using software you don’t like. This guide offers alternatives: https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-back-up-and-organize-photos-from-your-iphone-or-ipad to using iCloud.
If you don’t want to use a cloud-based backup (for reasons of privacy, convenience, price, et cetera), simply saving it to the computer’s hard drive or a jump drive with enough storage space will also do the job of providing a backup. The one caveat is that physical backups must be manually maintained, and ideally monitored for signs of failure to prevent the worst-case of a system and backup failure. Since these do not automatically update like cloud backups do, you may find yourself weeks or months behind your actual current-day backup system, too – so be sure to set reminders.
Windows 10 support ends in October. You may know that this makes Windows 10 machines vulnerable, but maybe not exactly why. There are a number of potential threats to any device that hasn’t been updated – so here’s a breakdown of the potential risks of keeping an active Windows 10 device on your network!
As a reminder, we deal primarily with business devices. In theory, a personal computer only used to access known, safe websites is low-risk. However, we still don’t recommend it. The modern web and modern viruses are more high-stakes than ever! You could receive an email from someone you know (as in, the address is the correct address they normally send from) and have it contain a virus because their account got hacked, and then the chain continues using your email, and your contact list. Or, you download an innocuous file from your hacked friend before learning they were hacked, and your device slows waaay down because it’s been mining Bitcoin in the background for whoever initially hacked that account, using an exploit that Windows 10 was not aware of.
Crucially, we won’t see a lot of these problems until after the hacks start happening, which will likely be around the time Windows takes it’s eyes off of Windows 10. Zero-day exploits are valuable to hackers, who are very interested in keeping that information secret until it would benefit them the most – government organizations waging cyber-warfare will want to keep their angle of attack hidden until they need to break something. The target won’t know there’s a vulnerability in their anti-virus until they’re already hacked.
The big issue with zero-day hacks is that they’re naturally resistant to the built-in antivirus Windows uses, because if the antivirus was aware of the exploit, then it wouldn’t be an exploit. There wouldn’t be a security hole. As a result, keeping a machine up-to-date as exploits are found and then dealt with is one of the best ways to keep yourself safe from the system-ruining kinds of hacks and ransomware that have sprung up in the blockchain era. Now that Windows will not be supporting Windows 10 anymore, updates will be incredibly sparse if they happen at all.
This is why it’s a good idea to update if you can! Windows will stop probing it’s programs for exploits. Whatever it misses will become fodder for hackers, and while Windows may go back and fix something huge it missed, it likely won’t spend the time to fix the small things anymore.
If you need help managing risk, get in touch: https://elixistechnology.com/contact/
