Ransomware Horror

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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 helped to pay him anyway.

Back to the story. With DiskDoctor installed, I was able to browse the deleted files just as if they had never been deleted. I copied them over to my other hard drive and was back in business.

I learned to set up a backup system, and to browse the net only in user mode, never admin mode.

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