Very nasty new Ransomware

[Roger]

Turning on your computer and instead of the usual Windows icon loading, you get a flashing red and white screen with a skull-and-crossbones.


Unless you have an image of your disk you are stuffed - it has encrypted your disk and destroyed the master boot record - there is no fix for this!

You contract this via an email inviting you to download file from Dropbox - a legitimate service

Check any document that you get via email or download from Dropbox that you are not 100% certain of before you open it.

To check any file, the best option is to use VirusTotal

• Open your browser and go to www.virustotal.com. It will look something like this:

• Click on the Choose File button and browse to the file that you want to scan. When you?ve found the file, click Open.

• click the Scan it! button to start the scan.

• After a few minutes the scan is usually complete and display results. If it's known to be bad, it'll look something like this:

I stress known to be bad. as these things take a while to appear on VT, so be very careful with anything you're not sure of. I've had at least 6 attempts to infect my machine this week - all from email addresses of people I know (theses addresses are spoofed)

 

[sportsterchop]

Re: Very nasty new Ransomware

Thanks Roger,

 

[Gizmo]

Re: Very nasty new Ransomware

Thanks Roger.

I have noticed an increase in the number of bogus emails coming in which masquerade as legitimate known businesess which try and get you to download files they have named "invoice" or similar. I have emails from hotels, car rental companies etc... so far I have spotted them because they are companies we have never traded with so the seem out of place. Very easy to get caught out.