Ransomware Horror
I visited a manufacturer's website to get some product information when suddenly my computer locked up. After trying various things, I restarted. Horrors! On restart I got a popup saying that my computer files were corrupted and that I had to send $39.99 USD to some random guy for him to fix it. Not wanting to do any more damage than I already had, I powered it down. I grabbed a linux live CD and booted into Linux. On exploring my hard drive, all of my files were gone. I had a spare hard drive kicking around, so I swapped it out and reinstalled windows. I put the old drive into an external case, plugged it in and scanned it. A ransomware virus was found and killed. Fortunately for me, this was a weak virus, only deleting the files, not encrypting the drive. I downloaded DiskDoctor and paid the 39.99 to them instead of paying idiot-stick who coded the virus. (I refuse to call terrorists, hackers, and other stupid criminals "masterminds") It wouldn't likely have ...