Beware of Jigsaw, the newest ransomware trojan. It does not wait for you to pay a ransom. Within the first 24 hours it deletes files and then accelerates the process exponentially to show you they mean business in the nastiest way. Once the files are deleted, nobody can get them back, not even the ransomware hostage-taker.
Read here for more information from Sonicwall where I saw this news first revealed.
This blog is getting a surprising amount of traffic. Because of the interest we decided to suggest a couple of other links for you:
- Be Ransomware Aware – Some tips for your user community on how to spot and avoid ransomware.
- I Am a Non-Technical Executive… What Seven Things Should I Be Asking My IT Guys About IT Security? – Here are some tips you should be asking your IT guys or if you are an IT guy you should be prepared to answer these.
- New Virulent, Wide-Spread and Expensive Ransomware Outbreak Coming to You Soon – A tale of two different ransomware outcomes based upon user access rights. Both of these did far better than Hollywood Presbyterian where they were down for 10 days and paid a $17,000 ransom.
- Ransomware PDR – Protect, Detect and Recover, a good place to start to be better prepared to combat ransomware
- What 12 Security Things Should I Focus on to Be Defensible in 2016? – 12 great things you can do to be more secure without spending much money by using a lot of tools you probably already have.
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.