Ransomware!
At work, we each have our own private network directory mapped to the h: drive, and that’s where I keep all of my writing projects, along with my backup of anything I particularly care about from home. Today I arrived at the office to discover that around 4 a.m. mine had been hijacked! There was this text message file explaining that all of my files had been encrypted, and that if I ever wanted to see them again, I could go to some particular website and learn how to pay to get them back.
The IT guy told me that it’s a big scam by the Russian mafia called ransomware. They typically want two Bitcoins (about $800, he says) to get the encryption key, or I could wait maybe a year for the U.S. government to crack the encryptions. That’s for my home computer that he assumed must have been infected before it transferred the malware to the h: drive; as for the h: drive itself, he could just clean it up and restore it. Whew!
And then when I got home, my laptop actually was just fine, as far as I can tell. But still, yikes!
Here’s a link the IT guy gave me to learn more about an earlier version of this malware: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/cryptowall-ransomware-information
The IT guy told me that it’s a big scam by the Russian mafia called ransomware. They typically want two Bitcoins (about $800, he says) to get the encryption key, or I could wait maybe a year for the U.S. government to crack the encryptions. That’s for my home computer that he assumed must have been infected before it transferred the malware to the h: drive; as for the h: drive itself, he could just clean it up and restore it. Whew!
And then when I got home, my laptop actually was just fine, as far as I can tell. But still, yikes!
Here’s a link the IT guy gave me to learn more about an earlier version of this malware: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/cryptowall-ransomware-information