Thank God for backups! And thank you for making sure people make backups.

My mother is in a similar situation. She is an elementary school teacher, and has little time for unrelated endeavors like this. What time she does have, is spent in the garden, as it should be.

Nevertheless, we are now seeing that the time-cost of closed source software, is greater than that of open-source software. My solution has been to prepare a KDE based distro for her, to work with her, side by side, whenever she needs to learn new tools. It is a good bonding experience, when both people can maintain a positive attitude about it.

The solution to the problem of malware, is education.

How quickly some forget heartbleed.

The solution to malware is obscurity. Have an OS that no one wants to break into, and you won't be broken into.

I think you are referring to diversity, not obscurity. Diversity does indeed increase the resilience of the network, but there will always be enough common factors across the board, that diversity alone will not suffice.

In the end, the software that we depend on, must be reviewable by anyone who is concerned about it. A prerequisite for that, is that software should be as small, clean, and simple as possible, to encourage such scrutiny. IIRC, the real problem with heartbleed, is that the OpenSSL codebase was a mess, and no-one wanted to work on it.

> The solution to malware is obscurity. Have an OS that no one wants to break into ...

... and you'll have an OS for which neither malware authors nor legitimate software developers want to write applications.

There's a trade-off involved. We could all use pen an paper and be invulnerable to malware, but then how would we post on HN?

That's my point, as I type this on fully patched Win 10 Pro.

Certainly Windows has its issues, but it's biggest 'flaw' when it comes to malware isn't that it's closed-source, but that it's ubiquitous and therefore a highly attractive target.

Linux is ubiquitous in the data center. We are not a low-value target. Also, corporations with cloud-based infrastructure are more likely to pay large ransoms for their data, especially if it is the backup/archive system that is attacked.

Data centers are dwarfed in size by the consumer and business markets, while also being much less vulnerable due to their more specialised nature and therefore ease of update. Case in point: there are plenty of windows data centres out there, but its not likely any of them were effected by this incident.

Heartbleed is a very different class of vulnerability -- it allows sensitive information to leak but does not provide root access.

Quick, migrate to TempleOS!

That's rather extreme, I think but Haiku or Windows 98 with IE4 could possibly be quite safe from viruses nowadays, even if not exactly "secure".

Are macOS or ChromeOS options?

Heck, some of my relatives are good with an iPad for 90% of their online activities.

Chromeos and everything in browser sandbox with always up to date software sounds pretty solid.

So reinstall the OS from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.