And this erodes trust in society and rule of law, and gradually leads to vigilantism, privatization of security, and segregation due to middle-class flight from high-crime areas.
I don't disagree, but I hear very little discussion about low solve rates for smaller crimes.
No, I would say that a few counties have decided this, but the majority of counties have not. In most places, you do get arrested for property crimes, you still serve prison time for this, police still do things like use bait cars and exert resources to catch those who steal, and the idea that property crime should not result in jail time is not widely accepted by the majority of the population.
Having a physical write-enable switch on the backup devices costs about three cents.
With the way I understand ransomware works, merely connecting a backup to the system will corrupt it. This is where a write-enable switch really comes into play, it cannot corrupt the backup when you're trying to restore from it. And if you have online archival databases, they can't be corrupted, either. After all, how much of your company data really needs to be writable? Certainly not last week's payroll records.
With append-only incremental backup systems, enforced by hardware, it'll take a lot longer to need to recycle the backups and risk them. Tape backup already does this inherently.
Another thing you can do with a backup drive, is attempt to read it from a clean system that has never been connected to the network. If you can read it, it isn't corrupted. Then, have a process where once a week see if the backup can be read. Then your worst case is a week lost.
Second, where is this idea coming from that corrupted backups are the issue? You're solving a problem that doesn't exist and creating a real one.
When I read about how ransomware encrypted every drive attached to it, and encrypted the backup drives when they were attached. This was why the ransomware waited some length of time before shutting off access to the user - they wanted to get the backup drives encrypted, too.
> You're solving a problem that doesn't exist
Now you know!
If you meant write some software to activate the switch, that kinda misses the point!
As how much is being spent on these payments overall each year? How would that compare to the massive IT fortification project people are demanding?
We don't meaningfully fight bike theft for this reason. The cost of doing so relative to the benefits is just too high. We can debate whether that is reasonable, but that is essentially what has been decided as a society. Most low level crime is not meaningfully investigated.