This is something new I didn't know about Win 10 Windows Defender:

Protect Yourself from Ransomware using Win 10

I go into Defender from time to time and at first glance it looks like everything is turned on and working but when I went into Ransomware Protection it wasn't turned on. Why not? Everything else is on by default so why not this? Whatever, I turned it on.

Bob

Bob, thanx so much for this. I looked and my Ransomware Protection indicated no action necessary. But when I looked it was turned off! Weird! It is on now thanx to you!

Mine was off as well. Thanks, Bob.

I had to re-activate Microsoft One Drive to get the ransomware protection turned on, but I suppose it's a small price to pay to be safer.

Since I have both Malwarebytes Pro and Super AntiSpyware Pro running, I thought I might run into the block mentioned in the article, but it went OK.

EDIT: Build 633 was just stopped until I excluded the install file. Ha.

In addition to that Matt, I had two other files blocked and had to do that as well. I can see this may not be for everybody but I'm keeping it on.

Bob

Why is it off? I'll play the "Devil's Advocate" here...

Some may not want to have a one-drive account. After all, anything in the cloud can be hacked as well as anything on your computer. The more places your files are, the more vulnerable they are.

Some of us may want to keep archives of our past disk images on removable drives.

There is more than one way to protect yourself.

Thanks for the information, it looks like a good service.

Insights and incites by Notes

Yeah, Notes. I was wondering that too. It may be off for people that had previously deactivated One Drive. I don't use it either.

Of course, that's why my One Drive has nothing in it. I only activated it some years ago to have something to use for a 3rd party attachment here.

Bob

I've only used one of those cloud drives, Dropbox. It was eventually hacked.

There was nothing worth stealing on it, just a couple of pictures that I was sending from my PC to my iPad (I got rid of the iPad because it is a PITA to transfer files from the PC to it).

They did get a password that I used only for drop-box.

Now I get a lot of e-mails from my own address (spoofed of course) telling me they hacked my account, and use that password as "proof". The letter explains that they have been watching me via my camera (which my computer doesn't have) viewing embarrassing content and doing embarrassing things. If I don't pay a huge amount of bitcoins they will post the video to all my contacts.

Of course it's a scam, of course I didn't pay, and of course, nothing happened.

But I've received probably over 100 of these over the past year. Sometimes 10 a day. It's a mild irritant, and if I had never used Dropbox, I probably would not have this problem.

So it's "No thank you" to all the cloud drives for me. (I closed DropBox as well).

Notes