Main Computer back up

This morning, someone tried to hack into my computer.  Well not tried they did.  And it took me from 7:00 am until now 10:50 am to get my system back up.  I wish to thank the Lord for giving me the foresight to have back recovery discs, factory install disks and a full back up of my system as of midnight last night.

I've got scans running on the main system, and I finished running scans on this netbook earlier.  I THINK I know how they did it, and the router is getting it's firmware upgraded in a few minutes with a special firewall tweak a friend of mine wrote.

According to the remains of my logs, (Most of them were wiped out) an IP originating in California, I can't narrow it down closer than that, all I got were the first 2 portions of the IP, got through my router firewall and attacked my desktop.  Evidently when I was trying out a game I inadvertently opened a port in my system I shouldn't have.  Allowing whoever it was into my system.

I'm not saying this is related to what I write on my blog, but people have tried to hack me before, after I wrote something and posted it on the blog. 

Well the main system is back up, scans are getting run to make sure whoever did this didn't leave a surprise on the hard drive.

And I'm really going to reconsider getting that RAID system.  Having a full complete back up on a separate drive saved me I don't know how many hours of toil trying to get my system back to where it should be.

And if you're reading this, do YOU have your system backed up?  To a totally SEPARATE hard drive?

Mine is completely external through a USB external enclosure, so if I needed to I could just pull the plug and take the drive with me.

Having that type of piece of mind is worth the $90.00 I spent for a 1 TB external drive.

In actuality I have 3 1 TB USB drives, I've been using the other 2 to transfer large files between computers and to back up pictures.  I think I'm going to condense the 2 into 1, and use the extra 1 TB drive as an extra back up drive until I can put together a RAID system.

So if you don't have your computer, laptop, or whatever setup to back itself up, onto an external drive, you really need to reconsider that.

I'll probably be off the rest of the day, making sure they desktop is up to snuff and there are no nasties awaiting me on the drive someone might have left there.

So back up your DATA!!  And make sure it's done on an EXTERNAL drive.  Also use your firewall.  I have 2 of them, the hardware on in the router plus a software one on the desktop, the netbook and my tablet.

Be Secure and protect your computer and your files.