A better advice to keep us out of grief - live in the real physical world, spending quality time in the body with yourself, your family and your friends, use paper for your records and stop depending on internet gadgets. People lived happily without it for millennia!

Yuyutsu, good advice, and yet here you are, happily posting on an Internet forum on a regular basis : )

My rule has always been that if it sounds too good to be true, then it most certainly is false...so don't get caught up in anything online.

Yes Suse, And another, if you don't understand it don't buy it!

However the suggestion to use paper and or disc backups is good advice, and where possible and where extremely confidential information is involved, we have local innovation in the form of Quantum computing, and the way for official secrets to remain secret from those who would SEEK TO PROFIT from their untimely exposure!

For some reason, I an old aged pensioner, with a preexisting spinal injury and at home recovering from a stroke, have been targeted by some downright dumb IT savvy folks.

With the result part of my operating program is regularly extracted.

Now these folks aren't anywhere near as smart as they think they are, given they would spend all that time and effort (trying to squeeze blood from stone) on someone with more income, and the practise of storing critical information online.

Moreover, when part of the program disappears it takes only a few minutes to insert a disc, and replace the purloined program.

Resetting the ADSL took a little longer, when it also started to malfunction and effectively gagged me, by regularly dropping out, for twelve hours.

Now I know most of this stuff could be avoided if I just bought some expensive security? However, that would likely give the hackers/"security experts", effective open door access as some sort of "invited" trusted teamviewer, able to look through everything I have?

Sort of like reading someone's personal diary, and innermost private thoughts, you know the sort some folks used to have, protected by a lock and key. But given today's world I don't even trust that, and keep anything I'm not prepared to share in my head!
Cheers, Rhrosty.

For most home users the author provides excellent advice:

"The next step is to enhance computer users’ security awareness. People should exercise more caution concerning things like suspicious email attachments. Backups should become a good habit. Backups can resolve all problems associated with encrypted or infected files."

A full system backup (system image) can, and will, get you out of a lot of strife - whether accidental or not. Freeware for this purpose is widely available.

It's also a good idea (if you have the time and interest) to keep abreast of what's happening in the cyber-security world.

A good first step would be to visit: https://krebsonsecurity.com/