Ransom Virus

[Eric Oyen]

well, I wish your friend a lot of luck. The encryption is very difficult to break and would likely take longer than its worth.

This is why I strongly recommend daily backups of important data. I have already seen this on my windows laptop. Fortunately, I had already made a backup of the entire system. So, It was easy for me to erase using a Linux rescue disk and then put the old OS back in place. THe only reason for me to have windows at all around here is for some of the windows specific applications that are able to be used with JAWS (screen reader for the blind). All the rest of the time I spend on either the Linux partition on this mac, or OS X (where I do all my mail).

So, there you have the lesson. Backup, backup, and more backup (even make a backp of the backup).

-eric

On Jun 19, 2014, at 7:19 PM, Ralph Prowell wrote:

> Just recently a friend of mine opened an outlook message that asked her to download a program that turned out to be a ransom virus and has encrypted all of her Microsoft office files and are wanting her to pay a ransom of $500 to get her files back.  
> 
> Has anyone had any success in retrieving these ransom files from an infected machine?  If so please contact me if you have any ideas how to retrieve these files.
> 
> Thank you,
> Ralph
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> ---------------------------------------------------
> PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org
> To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings:
> http://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss