Virus Warning

[acinpcola]

Greetings All, Today I was hit with the CryptoLocker virus and it is not pretty:yikes:. It is the type of virus that once inside your machine it encrypts all your text, pictures, and print shop files. The only way to get the key to unlock the encryption is to pay a 300 USD fee to the hackers. Spy Hunter 4 will remove the virus however at present there seems to be no program to undo the encryption to your files and all the techs that I talked with today gave me the same answer and that is: Consider those files as gone.

Just wanted to get the word out to my Spyder Lovers Family

AC

[Dan McNally]

That is why full backups of valuable data is so critical . . . this is a particularly nasty virus . . . and if you do actually pay the hijackers, stand by for bogus charges on your credit card . . .

[Bob Denman]

That is why full backups of valuable data is so critical . . . this is a particularly nasty virus . . . and if you do actually pay the hijackers, stand by for bogus charges on your credit card . . .
:agree: Once they've got ya; you're DONE! :gaah:

Sorry...

[Knarfoh]

That is why full backups of valuable data is so critical . . . this is a particularly nasty virus . . . and if you do actually pay the hijackers, stand by for bogus charges on your credit card . . .
http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/cryptolocker.asp

[ARtraveler]

Greetings All, Today I was hit with the CryptoLocker virus and it is not pretty:yikes:. It is the type of virus that once inside your machine it encrypts all your text, pictures, and print shop files. The only way to get the key to unlock the encryption is to pay a 300 USD fee to the hackers. Spy Hunter 4 will remove the virus however at present there seems to be no program to undo the encryption to your files and all the techs that I talked with today gave me the same answer and that is: Consider those files as gone.

Just wanted to get the word out to my Spyder Lovers Family

AC

Thank you for the warning. Surprising to me that the hackers can try getting away with a fee to unlock. :yikes:

[spyder-dude]

Yeah this one is spreading pretty rapidly. I have been in the computer business for 26 years and this is one of the worst ones ever.

Big thing is that most virus protection will not catch it as they have a lot of variants of it coming out daily. Some spam/virus filtering systems will block the zip files but not all of them will.

Don't open any email attachments, especially the ones with a zip file attached as that is how this virus is spreading. They sometimes say it is a UPS, Fedex or DHL tracking information, fake amazon invoices or voicemail message files. The enticement for a user (especially a business who ships things using these carriers) is that it is legit and they open it. Boom. They are now infected. This malware will look at the local and network drives and shares, and will ENCRYPT files matching a set of extensions for common business applications. This includes office applications (Excel, Word, WordPerfect) and databases like access and Foxpro. We recommend not clicking on any attachment unless you are 100% sure that it is legit.

I had a blog post on my website/Facebook/linkedin/twitter a couple of weeks ago about this: http://www.acscva.com/2013/10/24/dangerous-cryptolocker-ransomware-threatens-individuals-and-small-business/

Later,

Shawn