Thursday
Nov072013
CryptoLocker
Thursday, November 7, 2013 at 7:49AM I wanted to take a minute to let you know about a new virus that's been going around. Its called Crypto locker. It's not a new concept but this one is spreading fast and is very serious.
What it does when it infects a computer or network is it encrypts all files on your computer and even files on your company server and external hard drives. Once encrypted there is simply no way for you to access them. A pop up on the screen then demands $300 to get the files decrypted. The virus writers are using very good encryption which cannot be cracked.
Here's the problems...
Once your computer is encrypted, the key which is what is needed to decrypt your files are stored on one of many of the bad guy computers somewhere in the world. When you pay the $300 it goes out to that server, get the key, and unlocks your files. The only good news is that it is actually doing this for many people once you pay the ransom. 
But here are the problems. As the FBI and other law enforcement agencies around the world are locating these bad guy servers and shutting them down your files can never be decrypted and you lose everything since that server was the only one in the world containing the key needed to unlock your computer.
Problem two is if you back to external hard drive than that gets encrypted too if it was plugged into the computer. If you have a server which you access from your computer then those files on the server get encypted too.
The only thing you can do is restore your data from a backup that was not connected to your computers.
If you use multiple external hard drives but you haven't swapped them in a long time then the most recent files you will get back are the ones on the drive that was not connected to your computer.
You get this virus by clicking on links in emails, pretty much the way you get every virus these days. The best choice of course is to never click on unknown links in emails as we at Computer Solutions tell our clients all the time. Option number 2 is to be swapping your backup drives regularly and you should be using five drives. One for each day of the week. And lastly, the best option is to use off site backups.
Having a backup that is stored off sight and is not accessible by your network directly is the safest option. For example if you use most online backup services including those provided by Computer Solutions you don't really send the files to us but we pull them FROM you. Meaning we access your server and then copy the files over to us. If your computer's get infected with a virus the virus has no way possible of accessing our servers to damage your files. With this virus (and we have seen this multiple times already) it is extremely important that you have off site backups either through a service like those provided by Computer Solutions or by using who external hard drives and taking them home nightly. Either way, don't take chances with your company data!
Having a backup that is stored off sight and is not accessible by your network directly is the safest option. For example if you use most online backup services including those provided by Computer Solutions you don't really send the files to us but we pull them FROM you. Meaning we access your server and then copy the files over to us. If your computer's get infected with a virus the virus has no way possible of accessing our servers to damage your files. With this virus (and we have seen this multiple times already) it is extremely important that you have off site backups either through a service like those provided by Computer Solutions or by using who external hard drives and taking them home nightly. Either way, don't take chances with your company data!
As we always say, you can always replace your computers but the data is Not replaceable. Think about if you walked in your office tomorrow and all your company data was gone. How serious of a problem would that be? Then decide today what you're going to do to prevent that from happening.
More information about off site backups: http://www.ineedbob.com/ineedbobnet/backup.html
More information about Cryptolocker: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoLocker
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