Just in case you haven't seen this latest nasty splashed all over the news.
tinyurl.com/npfm6ub
I've been using the free version of HitmanPro recently to clean up a friend's computer to good effect and they seem to be able to rid a PC of it: www.surfright.nl/en
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What about the encrypted files, Victor?
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they stay encrypted. In effect lost.
It only gets loaded if you are a complete numpty.
Last edited by: Zero on Mon 18 Nov 13 at 20:37
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>> What about the encrypted files, Victor?
Either have a backup &/or watch this HitmanPro video: tinyurl.com/oj784dp
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A customer of mine (a professor as it goes HE is not a numpty!) got infected with this a few weeks ago. It encrypted all his data and he had no backup.
Thankfully I was able to recover all his data by using shadow copies BUT the latest version if Cryptolocker disables this so once infected if you have no backups you either need to pay the ransom or kiss your data good bye.
I deal with a lot of ransomware and its usually a doddle to recover the data but Cyptolocker does not mess about!
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>> A customer of mine (a professor .... HE is not a numpty!) got infected..... it encrypted all his data .... had no backup.
So he is a numpty then.
Last edited by: rtj70 on Mon 18 Nov 13 at 21:43
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He had registered for online tax returns at the Inland Revenue night before. The next day he gets an email from them, downloads the zip file...... the rest is history.
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I guess I must be lucky. After thinking a bit about security a year or so ago after a conversation here I invested in an additional machine so that I can have a standalone work machine which is quite well secured.
For my recreational machine I run MSE and the [very] occasional Panda scan. They seem to find things from time to time, but nothing obvious has gone amiss in a year-ish.
Mind you, I don't open anything I don't recognise, anymore than I answer a call from "Number withheld / unknown", but an email from the pfds at HMRC with attachments might catch me out.
Last edited by: VxFan on Tue 3 Dec 13 at 12:53
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Those emails are so badly written that you would have to be stupid to get caught out, but if you're a rush, you've been working for 15 hours etc it is hard to think straight.
My client at the time was very very busy with work and that is why he got caught out.l
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I haven't been caught out very often, but every time I have been and have subsequently reflected on it, then my own stupidity and naivety is normally glaringly, and embarrassingly, obvious.
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>> My client at the time was very very busy with work and that is why he got caught out.l
He's a numpty in my opinion because he didn't have backed up copies of the files. If they are important then regular backups should be taken.
My photos/videos are the only thing that are probably irreplaceable and are backed up automatically to an external drive (along with everything else) and to the Cloud. Music also secured via Google Play Music (replaceable at a considerable cost). Everything else also backed up automatically. And then I do manual backups.
Drive failure/corruption would be more of a risk than malware though.
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and there you have it really, you are much more likely to loose your data from drive failure than being crypto'd - so no back up = your own silly problem.
Last edited by: Zero on Tue 19 Nov 13 at 08:51
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I'm sure Zero is right. Yet I realise how hard it is to discipline yourself to do back-ups properly. It is only because my computer holds two sorts of information that I could not - realistically - replace, and which I know I will be relying on in the future, that I make myself do the back-up every night, last thing, on a portable hard drive.
I'm talking about thousands of photos and also musical compositions, which are the fruit of many hundreds of hours' work and which will be assessed later for my MMus course. It was the reality of the possible loss of these (theft of computer, hard disk failure) that convinced me to do something.
Maybe if everyone thought hard about the consequences of data loss more of us would do the right thing.
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My Mac does incremental backups (Time Machine) all the time. So not only do I have a full backup which it's possible to reinstall from (easier with a disk backup/clone) but there are multiple versions of files going back over time.
Surely someone on here can recommend an equivalent - Microsoft used to have a sync/backup GUI that could schedule regular incremental syncing of file changes. If it was me, I'd schedule something like ROBOCOPY to run in the background periodically to sync changes.
With the Mac, the Time Machine backup is automatic and non-intrusive. I then regularly sync (using rsync) the folders of importance to my NAS. And less often, rsync the entire NAS to a USB drive.
And as mentioned, music is sync'd to Google Play Music (free) and photos go to the cloud (currently Dropbox, also free 74GB of storage).
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CryptoLocker Malware - Manatee
