Virus Cryptowall is NASTY

[Cyclonemom]

Long story short, even "normal" looking attachments from expected senders can harbor nasty bugs. Opened up a resume on my personal laptop, only to have it infect my whole system with Cryptowall ransomware. All files, pics, etc are forever unretrievable. Need to wipe the whole computer and reinstall.

FYI - for those of you running Free AVG, it activated, but didn't stop the infection. Learned my lesson, and will now be upgrading that, as well as paying for Malwarebytes, instead of just using the free version that I run after the fact......

Thankfully I opened that email here, and didn't infect the whole network at work. That would have been EPICALLY BAD.

 

[Ku Commando]

I have never been faced w/ this situation.....however, I do find Bleepingcomputer.com to be helpful in getting out of many jams. Here is a writeup they did for Cryptowall

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/cryptowall-ransomware-information

 

[Cyclonemom]

I have never been faced w/ this situation.....however, I do find Bleepingcomputer.com to be helpful in getting out of many jams. Here is a writeup they did for Cryptowall

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/cryptowall-ransomware-information

Thank you KU, but I already have the reload in progress. Will definitely keep this website in mind in the future. Although I am certainly not tech savvy by today's standards, their directions seem easy enough to follow.

I do have a q though since you seem more computer savvy. When I used the F11 button on startup to start the reinstall of preloaded software, (HP Recovery Manager) it also gave an option to do a "backup". I have never used that function before. Can you use that to do a complete save of your files to an external drive/USB drive? Or does it save it back to the internal drives?

 

[Ku Commando]

I don't know if I'm that savvy....but I do take the mindset of "I'm not gonna let this machine beat me".

A quick lookup of the HP recovery manager software reveals it will do backups and restores on your document files from internal or external storage drives. For my peace of mind, I use USB flash drive for local storage....and use Google drive "the cloud" to store the same files "offsite"

http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c03056985

Figure sometime in the future, enough people will use cloud storage, it'll start raining down "bytes"

 

[Genevieve]

great example why I use and BUY Kasperskys protection. anyone who is too cheap to buy protection deserves to get burned.

sorry no pity here

and I'm NOT singling out the OP. just stating a fact.

cough up the money cheapskates and get real protection. stop buying the "extras" and get protected.

definitely do a usb backup of everything on your machine. and have a backup for the backup. the drives are cheap enough to be able to afford them now-a-days.

 

[Sith14]

Volume Shadow Copy is a service that runs in the background when you have System Restore active. It take periodic snapshots of your drive and stores them in a hidden archive. Download a program called Shadow Explorer ( free ). It lets you retrieve files from before Cryptowall struck which you can replace the encrypted files with.
I have saved a lot of computers using this program.

 

[GreenGecko]

I use Malwarebytes AND Webroot. I backup my docs, picts, etc to a removable drive every few weeks, and put it in my fire-safe.

 

[JF&P]

I've emailed myself all the important stuff....its on the Gmail server.

 

[Dennis Olson]

One should always have one's vital files on several different storage media. I mean, this IS a prepper forum. Not casting aspersions on Cyclonemom, but one should always have an off-platter backup of things that cannot be replaced. Even if that backup is somewhat outdated, it's better than having nothing at all.

 

[GammaRat]

And dont leave your backup USB drive attached to your computer. Always unplug it after backup.

Its possible for you backup drive to become encrypted too.