***ATTENTION, BEWARE OF THIS COMPUTER VIRUS*** Please read below, were dealing with this right now on several business clients and its now hitting home based computers. There is a new virus emerging this week, and its one of the worst ones in recent history. Please read on to keep your PC, both home and at work, safe. This new virus is being coined as the cryptolocker virus, and if it infects your computer, you could literally lose everything on your computer; this isnt a scare tactic or an overreaction, this is truth. If infected, its almost guaranteed you WILL lose every bit of data on your computer. Its operation, so far that weve seen, goes along lines as follows: 1) The victim receives an email, normally posing as one from, say, an official or department of some kind stating they have to fill out an attached form in order to process something, or stay active; weve seen one stating its from a health insurance department for work, as well as one reporting as a government office. They look and sound convincing enough to where some people dont question it. 2) attached to the email is a zip file, one in which you have to extract the document in the email; however there is no actual document, simply an executable virus that both looks like a .PDF file because it uses the PDF file icon as its icon, as well as is named something someone might glance over without realizing it was malicious, such as form265 section3.pdf.exe *THIS NEXT PART IS IMPORTANT* 3) once the executable is ran, the virus will then launch and begin encrypting your data, some in AES encryption, some in another format. It works quickly and efficiently and encrypts dozen of known file types; documents, pictures, programs, songs, almost everything. 4) After it has ran for a short period, it will then display a message telling you your data is encrypted with a personal encryption key and that you have 72 hours to pay before your key is deleted and your data is lost forever. Weve seen one stating pay $100, weve seen one stating $300. 5) this is all 100% true when the virus reports this. Your data is already encrypted. It is impossible to break the encryption, to brute force it to break it would be an impossibility as there are too many key entries to enumerate. You will die before the encryption is broken. Guaranteed. 6) Believe it or not, we had a couple of clients (and weve heard of others) paying the ransom fee to hopefully get their encryption key. A lot of them are reporting that doing so DID actually get them the key to unlock their data; some had it happen quickly, some it took 3-4 hours to verify payment was received, but a lot of them did actually get their data back. Some did not however. The thing that makes this virus so dangerous, beyond the obvious, is that if the virus runs and encrypts your data, if you or your antivirus program REMOVES the virus, ANY chance you had of hoping to retrieve your data IF you were considering to pay the ransom will be lost. Almost all antivirus programs operate by removing threats automatically, so if it sees this virus, if its halfway decent, your AV program will take it out, your data lost forever. There is no known fix for this virus if your data is encrypted. Your only hope is to pay the fee and hope it works. It is truly one of the worst viruses, in operation, in recent history. So please, please be careful in opening unfamiliar emails and never blindly open attachments, especially if you work in an office environment. Unfortunately, we had our first home based client come in a few hours ago with the same virus, reporting itself in email as a government form to fill out regarding healthcare, so this means you are susceptible to it too at home. We wish there were better news regarding this new virus. As always, having an antivirus program is paramount to having a clean PC. Come in any time to the shop and we can recommend a setup right for your home or office.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 02:05:10 +0000
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