Last week I was looking up a few things in Wikipedia and got hit with my first Virus ever. It locked up my computer completely except for one page where there were instructions as to how to unlock my machine. This involved to one of a few stores and getting some type of form which I was to send to their mail address along with $300 in cash.

Of course, I was not going to do this but did find out the name of the Virus (which I am not going to print here) except that the name was international in character and started with I and ended with ol.

I attempted to try a few re-boot techniques but nothing worked. I called my ISP and the person I talked with was familiar with it but no longer had instructions on how to remove it. I called one of my sons who is an electrical engineer and he came over with his laptop last Sunday and after two or three hours we eliminated it (whoopee!).

I sure will be careful from here on but was wondering if my description of what happened is familiar to any of our members. I hope I did no give too much information but am really curious.

Bob

Hi Bob,

It's a well known form of malware, commonly known as Ransomware.

You can read more about ransomware on the following Microsoft pages, e.g. how it's commonly installed, how to best prevent becoming infected, etc:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/security/resources/ransomware-whatis.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/mmpc/shared/ransomware.aspx

I hope that helps.

Bob, this was indeed Ransomware, been around for years. Hate to sound like a broken record at the Haven but if you've been making regular mirror image backups of your system you could have recovered back to normal within minutes, yes, even if you cannot boot into Windows. Windows has an excellent built-in mirror imaging program, if you have never used it, free and it works! Backups can many times be the superior security software.

Acadia

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The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution. -- Emerson

I could not agree more about regular mirror images being taken, and stored on a plug in hard drive. Personally I use a 1TB hard drive and Acronis

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The worlds finest composer ever, was Gustav Mahler.