Cryptowall Virus

[scott-atkinson]

Has anybody had any experience of their system being infected by the Cryptowall Virus?

My personal laptop became infected at the weekend, and the first I knew of it was when a Ransom note in four different file formats popped up upon my start up.

It was very helpful gave me lots of information on what the Hijackers had done to my laptop and how they had encrypted my files, even gave me some very helpful links to independent websites so I knew exactly what the infection was.

A link was provided to go to a payment website where, and this made me chuckle, I had to enter a verification code to access the site , this website then informed me that I had 7 days to pay 500 USD in Bitcoins or after 7 days the ransom went up to 1000 USD, after which my files would be locked down and fried beyond repair..

Of course I didn't pay, and took my laptop into a repair shop, told them to wipe the Hard Drives clean, re-format them and then re-load the OS and all relevant Drivers.

Luckily I didn't have anything really of importance on the drives other that some excel files and a few Saved Game files..

All my pictures I had backed up a month before, so they were pretty much safe..

The people who designed this Virus and took the time to build all the elaborate infrastructure around it, if they could actually turn their times to something other than Crime, I'm pretty sure they would be brilliant..

But for now, they are just a bunch of Bast*rds.. and I wish then a slow painful death.. I hope they have a good day

 

[burrina]

I use MalwareBytes but you could also use a free tool from Kaspersky that should remove it.

 

[Uncle Gizmo]

"A slow and painful death" LOL

 

[Bladerunner]

Scott from my perspective about your last sentence, will most likely come true.

 

[Vassago]

My favorite is the FBI warning ransomware. It pops up on start-up and infection, takes a picture using your webcam, then shows a full screen "official" message from the FBI complete with logos and such warning you that they have tracked illegal activities coming from your computer. It shows your picture and says they have issued warrants for your arrest, but, and imagine this, you can take care of it by clicking on their "official" link and paying some fines. Yeah, because the FBI or any other police entity would give you a warning that you are about to be arrested.

I've had a couple friends, both female, get infected with this one and call me in a panic. Of course they were surfing through adult websites at the time. Haha.

 

[Rx_]

http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/15seconds.asp
I don't actually do much Facebook. The chat in Facebook works on Mariner ship-to-ship messaging. Still, this one is set to share on Facebook then spawn all of the bad kind of spam one can imagine.
Still, a paid subscription to the virus (I don't remember the name, because it keeps on working) did get it out. It was nasty, required rebooting into safe mode a couple of time.

I did read the Russian hack was extremely bad if you didn't have your data backed up. People were advised to pay due to the cost of actually loosing the data.

 

[Rx_]

Code Project had an interesting article released today. Evidently spies are targeting the anti-virus industry. The headline was yet another reason to avoid anti-virus software.