We see this all the time... those guys are called lawyers and politicians.
Posted on 03/21/2015 9:30:33 AM PDT by xzins
This is a new one for me, but it seems a natural next step for the thieves in the virus/spyware business. I’ve often thought that the companies producing the solutions had a lot to gain from new viruses being created. That’s something I hope isn’t true, but it’s been in the back of my mind.
Now, the guy with the solution is the guy who creates the problem.
How can this not be an actionable crime?
Run a daily backup and it’ll never be an issue.
You don’t need to do either. It a scam. Shut down your computer, sign in as the administrator and run your antivirus scans to remove the virus.
It’s a clever virus but it can be removed. It just needs to be removed outside before you “sign in” to your computer, and that’s through administrator mode.
I’ve had this happen to me and resolved it.
This says that they lock you out of your files and that restore doesn’t necessarily help.
It’s a crime. But the criminals are in other countries and aren’t available for prosecution. At least not easily.
And how come you don't have up-to-date backups?
DO THE SMART THING:
It's a fact.
I’ve had this happen to me, as well. My solution has always been to go in before window’s starts and reset the system to an earlier date, then run Malwarebytes. Now if some white hat hacker were to track these guys down, we could round them up and shoot them.
The solution is to track these vermin down and break their skulls.
Exactly true.
There are great programs that can even give you hourly incrementals (like Apple's Time Machine) and you can go back to just before you got hit.
“How can this not be an actionable crime?”
It is a crime, but it usually is not actionable:
1. You have to have a government who is willing and capable of investigating and prosecuting such a crime, which we do not have at present.
2. The government must have a means of extraditing the suspect/s to stand trial, which they usually don’t with respect to the vast majority of cyber-criminals conducting state supported criminal racketeering from Russia, China, North Korea, and so forth.
Ransomware has destroyed three hard drives of my data so far....
We see this all the time... those guys are called lawyers and politicians.
Not true. Just restore from your recent backup.
You DO make backups, right???
I’ve not had it happen, and hopefully won’t, but it’s good to have that solution on file.
Wished Symantec could do it. On the couple with ransomware that came to me, it took either other 3rd party or just wiping and starting over.
I hate Symantec but McAfee is even worse. Supposedly we are going to it.
We're not talking about Windows System Restore. That's NOT A BACKUP.
We're talking about a full backup of the machine, plus incrementals of changed files. It's not hard to do. You just have to care about your work.
Yep. If Tom Jefferson was still President, he would have our federals doing this. This is one appropriate function/place for federal action.
Find them. Kill them.
It's a criminal attack on US citizens on US soil by foreign powers. Kill them.
/johnny
A much better solution, and the one I’d use if I was President, would be to form an elite unit that tracked these scum down and assassinated them in extremely gruesome fashion, leaving behind warning messages of a no uncertain character for the rest. My prediction is that these types of cyberattacks would quickly wane in the presence of such countertactics.
I also have a second HD in my home desktop where I store/install everything but the basic Win7 Pro operating system.
To your very good list I would add the following:
If someone actually HAS software that will make your machine 200% faster, why would they offer to give it away for free?
Porno sites are the WORST because no one wants to report being infected by one so they run free forever.
Unless your stupid IT department has locked this feature out, always turn on show file extensions. With it on, anything you receive from anybody that has an extension of .exe should be thrown away immediately. Even if it appears to have been sent by a friend.
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