Interesting article on Ransomware

[Candybee]

Saw this article on Yahoo. Its something I think everyone should read because it can happen to you. Its already happened to me and trust me its no picnic!!

 

The article is from businessinsider.com:

http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-to-do-if-your-computer-gets-taken-over-by-ransomware-2015-6

[Faerywren]

What did you do, Candybee?

[Karen M]

Wow, that is crazy, and yes what did you have to do?

[Karen M]

nevermind I see your other post, Candybee

[Candybee]

I ended up running several virus programs to knock out the ransomware from my computer. I lost all the files they encrypted including my photos.

 

The word and excel docs were not a biggie for me. More of an inconvenience. Fortunately for me, I was a word processor in a former life and can knock out a spreadsheet and word doc pretty fast. So within a week I had redone my documents. It was the loss of my photos that was the hardest to take. I had copies on another program but unfortunately those were connected to my comp so I lost the originals too.

 

All in all it took me about 2 days of comp cleanup and file deletion and another week or so of retyping my old documents.

 

Interestingly my label documents were not affected. I use Avery DesignPro and all labels were safe. Also, my other downloaded label program, Label Factory, was also uneffected.

 

But I will never get over the feeling of a 'home invasion' it left me with.

 

After reading that article I am beginning to wonder if the practice will last. If no one pays these crooks there is no point of them holding files for ransom. On the other hand, they can sure get revenge by encypting all your files!!

[Sylvie]

This happened to me in 2013. Every photo, document, and movie on my computer was encrypted and unusable. The pc repair people tried to retrieve them from the hard drive and couldn't do it. The even worse thing is that I was on my computer when it was attacked;  I was seeing strange processes and was trying to put my files on flash drives, which were connected to the computer. All of a sudden, the processes started tripling, and the computer bogged down. Then I saw the 'ransom' note, telling you whom to contact to unencrypt the files.  When I saw that the flash drives were encrypted, too, I was heartsick. A creepy thing happened after that. I thought I could restore the files by going back to an earlier date, & it was working, but then the restore points were wiped out! It was like someone  was looking over my shoulder & seeing what I was doing. I had some older info on CDs, but my more recent documents, etc. were on the flash drives. Now I'm keeping paper copies of information I can't easliy replace.