Crypto Locker virus hijacks your computer, makes you pay $300 ransom:

The wife picked one up a couple months ago. There are ways to rid yourself of some varieties. The net has a lot of fixes. My wife's variety seemed to have read about the same fixes I read about since the fixes did not work and we ultimately had to restore. Fortunately we are back up freaks and it was only the time that we lost.

We created another administrator account on all of our computers named rescue. Since the virus only infects (so far anyway) the account you normally log in with if you log in on another account you can seek to do repairs/fixes to the other.

Most of the virus I read about stick a small file in your startup directory and when the computer starts the virus begins. If you can go to that start directory and delete it then you can run a drive scan and it will rid the drive of anything else it might find.

Some evil nasty people out there in this world.

 

That's good information to know. I'll keep that in mind next time.

This must be why the anti-virus companies have you create a boot disk out of a flash drive or CD, because it bypasses the start up files on your C:\ drive and boots from the anti-virus boot disk instead.

Here's a trick I've learned. Immediately after you've discovered an infection do a search of all your drives (but typically the C:\ drive) looking for any executable files that were created in the past 24 hours or so. Search for:

*.exe

and set the custom search by date to a 2 day span or so.

If you find any executable files write down the name and the folder where it was found. Then do your virus and malware removal regimen. Afterwards, check to see if this executable file is still on your hard drive. If it is delete it.

There ought to be mandatory minimum sentences for these people, at least 5 years. The loss of productivity they cause every day must be enormous. Just take the time you spent on getting rid of this virus and multiply it by, say, 250,000 other people, then multiply that by 365 days a year. Such a waste of time being spent to rid our computers of these things.

 

your .exe search is a great idea!!

My wife had a bit of a stroke among many other issues a year ago and gets frustrated very easily. The computer mess really put her in a tizzy trying to get things back to normal. I did the major stuff but even the restore of data was a frustration for her.

It came with an email addy from a good friend, she of course opened the email and when she saw it wasn't from her she assumed it was spam. Next time she rebooted, bingo.

 

From what I've read, the nasty part about Cryptolocker is that you'll need the encryption key to decrypt any of your files that it's locked down. So you can get rid of it, but you may not be able to get your data back.

Another good reason to make back-ups, and keep them separate.

 

A virus I never got rid of on an old computer was a harmless but hilarious version of "Magister B". The only thing it did was make my desktop icons literally run away from the mouse! I loved it. It was hilarious to see people trying to open a program on my computer.