Malicious Ransom Virus - CRYPTOWALL 2.0 - Be Careful What You Click On.

[Pam Costa]

Hi Everyone,

There is a very bad Malware that is out there and it is hitting Home Users as well as Business and Corporate Servers called CRYPTOWALL 2.0. I wrote this blog post because it is so sneaky and comes in so many forms. The way it works is when you open an email attachment or click on an infected ad (they actually are embedded in advertisements on high profile websites) it downloads and deploys a program that encrypts all of your personal files rendering them unusable. When you try and open them, you are presented with a webpage that tells you they will give you the key after you pay a ransom of $500 which doubles after a certain time period.

This includes all of your data files, photos and even your Dropbox folder! Dropbox then syncs your files to the cloud and that includes the encrypted files! This is a new version of Crypto from 2013 that was very destructive, but you were sometimes able to recover your data without paying the ransom this version that started attacking mid-October, has only two choices - pay the ransom or reformat your hard drive.

I had a new client come to me a week ago because his computer was "acting funny" - it took me more than an hour to figure out what was going on. He did not keep anything on his computer so he chose to reformat the hard drive.

Here is the link to my post http://pctutornaples.com/351/malware-crypto-ransomware/

Please take a few minutes to read it - Back up your data ASAP onto an external storage device and disconnect it after you finish.

Pam

[ridgley]

I usually delete message that come I don't know sender either attempt to open their attachment. Anyway, thanks for warning.