Been thinking about this for a while now. I work from home. I have a mix of Linux and Windows PCs. My wife uses her own Windows laptop in my home network and at her place of employment. They have a BYOD setup there and the security is almost non-existent.
In both cases, she and I handle data owned by our individual clients. I am concerned about that data as well as personal data since we both regularly use my home network for work. Her laptop could get hit at her office network and spread though my home network or vice-versa. If we get ransomware, everything is at risk.
In general would switching everything in my control (to include her laptop) over to Linux give us better chances against getting infected by ransomware?
Having an all Linux network would of course reduce the chances of a ransomware, that’s not to say a penetrated network wouldn’t be as devastating. Nevertheless proper data maintenance hygiene should be followed whenever handling important data.
Since you handle all the data , I would recommend investing in handling it correctly with a proper file server, and snapshots and backup. You could get FREENAS, use its snapshots to help mitigate against ransomware in case of infection so you can roll back. You can also use backblaze b2 to backup for an offsite backup in case of a calamity.
Invest in a firewall or build one up with pfsense, so it definitely works better than a standard router.
The most popular ransomware tools are written to only target Windows computers and the attack vector is almost always email which means they don’t usually know what OS you are running to even change up the attack vector. So yes it would be less likely until the current methods and trends are changed.
@eltimbol I would also consider a DR standby site where you could spin up a VM for that what if situation where your on site systems are severely compromised. Put your wife on a VLAN same for you.