 Ladies and gents, I am about to do the unthinkable. I'm going to intentionally infect myself with one of the worst cybersecurity threats of our time. Ransomware. WannaCry.exe? That sounds like a fun game. Uh-oh, disk part 32 bit. That's not something I have installed. You guys see that? My pictures are all gone. Downloads, videos. All my files have been replaced by these encrypted containers. And pleasereadme.txt. Question, what's wrong with my files? Oops, your important files are encrypted. You will not be able to access them anymore. Whoa-ho! Your files will be lost on January 7th. Send $600 worth of Bitcoin. Well, that sucks. Lucky for us, we can just use the money that Acronis sent over to us to sponsor this video. Oh, and by the way, no, we're not sending them any money because we're gonna be using Acronis' latest True Image 2020 software to get back the files we lost while showing off some of their machine learning and cybersecurity features that will help protect us in the future. The basic principle of ransomware and crypto jacking is this. The user clicks on a link to a free cruise. Then the software encrypts the user's files and as the name implies, demands a ransom for the luxury of accessing the files ever again. It's like opening your door to a friendly looking old lady, but instead of complimenting you on your fashion choices, lttstore.com, by the way, she roundhouse kicks you, steals your car keys, and then demands 0.1 Bitcoins to have them back. And the problem is that while some ransomwares have been defeated, in many cases, there is simply no way to decrypt the files without actually paying the ransom. So we wanted to put Acronis up against Nob4's Rensim software, which simulates 15 ransomware infection scenarios and one crypto mining scenario. The purpose of this is to test your current network protection in a safe environment. And Rensim installs its own dummy files so that our super confidential files won't be accessed. By the way, guys, yes, we turned off all network connections physically on this thing before running this. Otherwise, it could really have junked up our network. Please do not do this at home. So let's try Rensim without any protection. And 16 out of 16 scenarios gobbled away at our system. As for just running Windows Defender, well, it actually did manage to block one of them, but the other 15 would have ended up wreaking havoc on our machine. Big oof, as the kids say. With Acronis True Image Active Protection, it managed to flag all the activity and all 16 of the scenarios were defended against as long as we clicked block when the pop-up came up. Do note though, that if you don't click block, it won't defend against it. That's to avoid it blocking false positives. Active Protection works by constantly observing data access patterns on not only your system, but also on both of Acronis's infected and non-infected processing farms. The Acronis Cloud AI then uses machine learning to build models for detecting suspicious behavior. When a model is created, it's pushed to all their customers so that on their system, the software can act preemptively, preventing a malicious data breach from bringing judgment day to your device. Now, in the event that genuine data access behavior is altered, such as updated software or unique activity, Acronis Active Protection is capable of creating and maintaining an adjustable whitelist and blacklist of programs. You guys actually saw that when we intentionally added WannaCry to our whitelist. Normally, you wouldn't do that. So, we're gonna wanna fix this nonsense background wallpaper that's sending us helpful reminders to pay up squirt and get back our private and important files. Because we made a full system backup of this device using Acronis True Image, we can simply restore it to a previous version and obtain all of our precious files back. By navigating to the recovery tab, we can see all of our previous backups, both the full system ones and each incremental backup. So then, restoring the system back to the state that it was in before we ever saw that luxury cruise advert is about 30 minutes with all of our files accessible again. Ransomware 0, Acronis 1. So let's show how we use True Image 2020 to do this. It starts with downloading it from the Acronis website, running the installation, and then upon startup, following the quick start guide through the setup and major features rundown here. Acronis offers a 30-day trial if you wanna try it out before you buy, but honestly, even your granddad could do this, allowing him to keep his Minesweeper high scores and outdated memes, both safe and sound. We used this feature here to make a mirror image of the entire system, backing up everything, all the way down to our drivers, system preferences, and virtual machines, so that the image can later be used to recover the entire PC and all of its content. And the thing is that this can be useful even outside of ransomware infections, like if our machine was ever lost or damaged. The tier that we're using also has five terabytes of Acronis's cloud storage, meaning that we are following the 3-2-1 principle for our data backup by having an offsite copy, with the added benefit of Acronis's cloud working like other cloud storage services and allowing individual files to be migrated to any other device. With one account, you can protect up to five windows or macOS machines and an unlimited number of Android and iOS mobile devices, along with your Office 365 data. So if you're sick of losing data or you dance with lady luck on dodgy sites far too often, click the link in the description to head over to Acronis's website. It's got lots more features that we didn't cover today, like deduplication to speed up the image creation process, master boot record protection, and its own self-defense mechanism to keep malware from shutting it down. For a limited time, guys, just for LTT viewers, Acronis is offering a discount on its True Image software, so head on over there at the link below now. Thanks again to Acronis for sponsoring this video. We'll see you guys in the next one.