TechRepublic also has some info in a related article;
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/cryptowall-what-it-is-and-how-to-protect-your-systems/
There are myriad prevention mechanisms, both computer-based and self-education, that can keep you from contracting this nastiness. Do a search for cryptolocker prevention and get educated.
If you are using the Professional version of Windows (7, 8, 10), you can edit either AppLocker or security policy settings to prevent applications from running in your appdata space. This restriction is VERY effective but can be a bit of a pain when installing some products that unload their installers to the appdata part of your local profile.
Wow, these b*stards should be nuked from orbit.
This is apparently the price people pay for not backing up their data.
I’d like to see a one penny tax per email to fund an internet police force to track down such perps.
we blocked it at my work using a custom rule in Mcafee. We discovered all of the variants want to use the base appdata folder from the user’s logged in profile to execute. Well, usually no one programs their apps to execute just from the root directory they usually create a folder to run from. So we stop this thing by preventing .exe’s from running from that root \\users\user profile\appdata folder. Now, this isn’t an option for everyone as some apps with sloppy programming might get blocked but this does work.