The US TV series The Good Wife may focus on law and politics, but the Chicago-based lawyers have always been involved in cutting-edge technology issues from Bitcoin to hacking communications. I suppose we should not have been surprised then when the episode which aired on British television this week, Shiny Objects series 6 episode 5, should feature the malware problem which has been the subject of our blog recently – Ransomware.
When the initial warning pops up on Diane’s laptop, she makes the cardinal error that we always counsel against; having clicked on an email attachment, she then proceeds to click on the pop-up alert. All the computers on the Florrick Agos network are instantly disabled, and their data is held to ransom with a menacing countdown to destruction. Unbelievably it appears that those well-paid lawyers had made no provision for malware protection or backup!
The programme certainly portrays the helplessness and devastation wrought by malware such as Cryptolocker. Of course, this law firm firstly has large reserves of cash at their disposal, and when paying the ransom fails, they are able to deploy their own detective Kalinda to track down the criminals with assistance from the FBI and a Russian-speaking colleague and reinstate the company’s vital data.
Of course, most of us do not have access to Florrick Agos’s resources, so we would be wise to learn the lesson from their experience and put protection and backups in place before we come under attack!
We are happy to recommend ESET antivirus products, as their software has alerted us to malicious attachments before we have even had the opportunity to click on them and infect the machine.
Who knew that watching a prime-time TV series could be so educational and informative?
