randomware

[Sammy]

Got a call Friday from my neighbor across the street. I usually handle her computer problems. Usually email issues. She is a senior citizen, online alot, and gets lots of email. So tough to encourage her to use the usual safety practices like never opening attachments or going to strange websites. Looks like she might have been hit with one of those ransomwares. This one pops up and demands money. She actually called them. She is smart enough not to give money or anything like that. Threatened the police. But of course that goes nowhere. Told her to keep it off until I could look at it today.

 

I downloaded a bitdefender boot disk to see if that will at least make the computer useable again and get rid of the infection itself. I hope. I do suspect there may be some encrypted files gone forever. Unless there are ways I can get them back. Anyone with experience in that?

[dudebroman]

I did at a previous job. Cryptolocker was the culprit. Only way we were able to rescue the situation was take the affect machines off the network by moving them to a new vlan which was segregated, and then restore all files by backup after deleting the Cryptolocker startup files.

 

The bastard is that those files are gone unless she's willing to either pay or has a backup (or someone has come up with a decryption for it and posted online).

[hxtr]

Got a call Friday from my neighbor across the street. I usually handle her computer problems. Usually email issues. She is a senior citizen, online alot, and gets lots of email. So tough to encourage her to use the usual safety practices like never opening attachments or going to strange websites. Looks like she might have been hit with one of those ransomwares. This one pops up and demands money. She actually called them. She is smart enough not to give money or anything like that. Threatened the police. But of course that goes nowhere. Told her to keep it off until I could look at it today.

 

I downloaded a bitdefender boot disk to see if that will at least make the computer useable again and get rid of the infection itself. I hope. I do suspect there may be some encrypted files gone forever. Unless there are ways I can get them back. Anyone with experience in that?

I hope it did not encrypt the files. That would really suck. Good luck Sammy. I know this could be a long evening. . 

[Sammy]

Running a boot rescue disk that is currently scanning. Going to take a long time obviously. In the end, I think the only thing that is important to her is the email. So if the infection is taken care of and I can get those out it will be enough. Then in the future start deleting existing email accounts and getting some new ones. Over the years she has gone to too many places and signed up for too many things and is bombarded with spam and who knows what else.

[KaptCrunch]

tell her that anything says free to avoid and if running java    

 

update it or completely remove java

[Hunter1948]

You may want to try this  works well. http://www.superantispyware.com/

Edited September 13, 2016 by Hunter