Crypto Virus – Please Take Time To Read

The crypto virus has become the biggest ever threat to computer and internet users around the world and has infected thousands of computers worldwide in just over 1 month.

The price has increased to £1000 to get your photos, doc’s etc… unlocked. Even police forces around the world are getting hit by this, they are having to pay to get their files unlocked.

The best way to prevent this is:

  1. Do not to click on links from social media sites that you are not 100% sure where they will lead you to.
  2. This is now the main cause of infection, do not open emails from unknown senders or even if you know the sender be careful. The email can spoof to look like some you know in your contacts and it can spoof to look like it came from an internal email address within your company so delete them straight away if you are not sure.
  3. Do not open attachments that you are not expecting, particularly attachments that are PDF.exe, they are usually compressed/zipped in emails that contain the virus. Once opened you are infected and you will not know until you cannot open a pic or file, or until the crypto has locked all your files and then you will have a countdown time in which to pay the money.
  4. Hover over any attachments and it should give some indication if it is an .exe masked as a PDF or other, If you’re not sure do not open it. Delete it

If you think you have got infected follow these guides or contact Loughtec’s office ASAP.

  1. Disconnect from the internet, the timer may start at this point in some cases.
  2. Do not power off your computer.
  3. At this point you will have to decide to pay the ransom, if you do wish to pay it to get your files back, you will need to buy some Bit coin, connect to the internet and pay the ransom using the coin.
  4. If you don’t wish to pay and are happy you have lost everything, download Malware bytes and a good antivirus, and clean your system, best advice would be to format it.
  5. Another and only other known hope of getting your files at this point provided you have not shutdown or rebooted your pc is to, get an external hard drive and a program called Photorecov, however it works on DOS and does not have a GUI, which some people may find difficult to use, this may recover some of your files but they will not be structured, so you will need to pick through the recovered files to get what is important to you. This will be very time consuming.

Finally the best advice is to do a daily backup of your data to an external drive or cloud backup service.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and pass it on, let others know about this virus and how to prevent losing your data.

If you need to discuss cloud/offsite backups, Anti-virus or cloud spam filters you can contact Loughtec’s office and they will be happy to give you some advice on this.

Thank you to Loughtec for this virus warning.