Divemedic

According to the NSA, was the Russian GRU who hacked my computer.  It seems to me that we are at war on the Internet.

Rioter says: “We are coming to the suburbs, if we don’t get what we want.“

Not a good idea, skippy.

As far as the in custody death that occurred in Minneapolis: I am withholding my opinion until all of the evidence is in. So many are rushing to judgement based upon selected bits of a video that hasn’t even been published in its entirety. There are many missing facts, too many to rush to convict the officers in this case.

I am seeing people say that there is no way you can justify keeping a knee on someone’s neck (not throat) for 7 minutes. Anyone who says that either has a political agenda or no experience with violent people. I can think of times that it is not only justifiable, but necessary. That doesn’t mean that it was in this case, but that there are times when it is.

Let me explain:
Back when I was a firefighter/paramedic, we were once called to a mobile home park for “altered mental status.” When we arrived, we were met in the yard of one of the mobile homes by a woman who told us that her husband was a diabetic who became combative every time his blood sugar dropped too low, and that she had just measured it at only 46 before we arrived. She also said to be careful because the man was on disability and had nothing to do all day but lift weights 8 hours a day.

We entered the front door to find a mildly agitated and confused male, pacing back and forth in the living room. He wasn’t a big man, but there was no fat on him. I asked to take his blood sugar. He refused. I tried for ten minutes to get him to eat something, or to agree to come to the hospital. He refused. For ten minutes.

Finally, I told him that he had no choice and he would have to go. He smiled and said, “Let’s do this, then.”

There were nine of us: Six firefighters and three cops. Not one of us was small. I weighed 250 pounds. He grabbed by Battalion chief by the throat and lifted him off the ground, straight armed. We tackled him and eventually wrestled him to the ground. He was still kicking our collective asses for almost ten minutes, even after we were on the ground. They tried a Taser- no effect.

We finally, with all of us lying on him, managed to get a pair of handcuffs on him. He strained, and broke the chain. Finally he got a little tired and we managed to get a second pair of cuffs on him. At that point, the easiest way to control a patient is the same way you control a steer- control the head. You pin them at the neck (not throat), shoulders, waist, and ankles.

I was unable to start in IV to give him sugar, so I had to resort to giving him a shot of Glucagon. Now glucagon takes a while to work, especially when you give it in a muscle. He continued wrestling with us for another ten minutes before we could get him in the rig. The only way to keep him down was to continue pinning him.

By the time we got to the hospital, his blood sugar was back in the normal range, and he was completely lucid. He shook my hand and thanked me, then apologized and said he hoped that no one was injured. He turned out to be the nicest guy in the world, once he was feeling better.

As for me, I had a torn uniform, fat lip, black eye, and bruises all over. I was sore for three days. There were nine of us, and he solidly kicked every one of our asses.

With all that has happened this month- a house fire and loss of all of my data to a hacker– I bought a new gun. I decided to make it to the range.

Since this is a new gun, I needed ammo. Everything is in short supply, and what is there is quite expensive. I saw 9mm FMJ selling at $20 a box. I wound up buying a 50 round box of .38 SPL FMJ that cost $35. There is a one box limit per customer per day at the LGS. I had brought a 50 round box with me. I had gotten it on sale back in January for $8.

There are two pistol ranges there, and there was a person who had rented a full auto was in the first one, so they put me into the second. I was the only shooter, so I took advantage of that and broke out the shot timer. I started by putting a pair of 15 round magazines of 9mm into a 7 yard target as quickly as I could line up the Holosun sight on my M&P9c. 30 rounds with a reload in 16.42 seconds. 29 of the shots were inside the 9 ring on a B-29 target. The seventh was low and left in the 7 ring. I slapped the trigger a bit and I knew it was a bad shot as soon as it broke.

I don’t consider myself to be a great shot, I just think that the Holosun has made a HUGE improvement in my accuracy and speed. That doesn’t change what happened next. The RSO came up behind me and said, “I was going to come over to tell you that you will do better by slowing down to aim, and not trying to be a cowboy, but I can’t argue with that target, that is great shooting.”

I replied that it wasn’t me, it was the sight. It really has done wonders for me.

He said, “It isn’t just that. You have to have great trigger control to be that consistent when shooting that fast. You are one of the best shooters I have seen shoot here in quite a while.”

When I switched to the revolver, I admitted to him that I rarely shot them. He told me the story about how he was a retired cop, and the 629 was the pistol he started his career with. He then gave me some pointers to help my shooting with it. One was: “Speedloaders are cheating. Learn to load them by hand before you worry about mastering speedloaders.”

Just two gun guys alone at a shooting range, sharing stories and talking about guns.

Despite all that has happened, I walked out out of the range smiling.

I bet going to gun control protests don’t make people feel like that.

“The spirit of the Boston Marathon is to be strong and to be smart, you need to have the strength, wisdom, and guidance from public officials to do what’s right.“

After the Parkland school shooting, the school district where I teach passed a new rule, requiring teachers to wear ID at all times. I am not sure how that will prevent school shootings, since shooters are almost never adults. They are almost always students or former students.

So sure enough, the next year a rule came out requiring students to do the same. Teachers were instructed to write a discipline referral for any student seen without a visible ID. So we began writing the referrals. One student told me “They can’t suspend all of us.” What eventually happened was the rule was no longer enforced, so that, after about a month, there were no IDs visible on a single student, and about a quarter of the staff stopped wearing them as well.

Now I see that schools are going to require all teachers and staff to wear a mask at all times when they return to school in the fall.

Good luck with that.

How can you know who to trust when the so-called good guys are scammers as well?

So it isn’t looking good. The software that got me was ech0raix. It is a ransomware attack that encrypts Linux based NAS drives made by QNAP. The infection was caught by the Malware AP, which told me to submit a help ticket to QNAP with the subject line “ransomware.”

I got a reply about an hour ago. The software uses a 173 character password to encrypt the files using a 256 bit algorithm. (If I am screwing up the terminology, bear with me. I was up all night trying to retrieve anything I can. I have been up for 32 hours) They say that the key is not entirely random, so there is a chance that someday it will be cracked. For that reason, I will lock the drives away, and maybe I can recover my stuff then.

They claim that it infects your system by brute forcing the password. QNAP accused me of having a weak password. I didn’t think I did- It was 11 characters long, upper case, lower case, punctuation, and numbers. I am not sure I believe that, because if all it is, is a brute force attack, then why does it only affect certain QNAP model numbers?

I used to backup data every six months by burning backups onto CD ROM, but I started using all QNAP software for backup, so we stopped doing backups. The last backup I have is from November of 2016. Almost everything since then is gone: Financial data, tax data, pictures, and everything else. I may have some of the pictures, but most are gone, including wedding pictures.

I don’t yet know what I have and don’t have. We are going through everything to see what we can find saved in various places that the malware may have missed. I will still continue to try and find a way to recover those files, but at this point, I don’t see much hope.

We will be getting rid of our NAS and returning to the old ways- backup to CD ROM once a quarter. Not as convenient day to day, but this is the first virus I have ever been hit with, and I have been online and computing since the days of BBS boards. (1980s)

I have been beating myself up for becoming complacent and not backing up all of the time, but I dropped the ball. I just know that I never want to see my wife that upset again. It wounds me to know that a good number (half or more) of her wedding pictures, our Europe vacation, our Alaska trip, and many pictures of the grandkids and me are gone for good, and the effect it has on her.

I am the victim of a ransomware attack. The ech0raix malware has encrypted all of the files on my computer. They are demanding $650 worth of bitcoin. My wife is in tears. The QNAP raid was our backup and I thought we were protected. All of our photos, including of our wedding, my entire life, and my dead father are on there. 1TB of files in all. It is irreplaceable.

The malware didn’t touch music or movie files. It only encrypted pictures, Office files, and PDFs.

I am looking for help in fixing this. I found a file on bleepingcomputers.com that claims to fix it, but none of the computers in the house will run it because they claim it is a virus itself.

I don’t know what to do. I considered paying the ransom, but people online are saying that paying doesn’t get you the decryption key.