Cryptolocker

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Has anyone had this happen to them?

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/f ... royal-mail

PC users are being warned to be on their guard against emails purporting to be from the Royal Mail and containing CryptoLocker, a malicious piece of software that locks computers with an unbreakable encryption.

I've heard of it but never been hit by it. I gather it is quite nasty and has caught a lot of people out. The bottom line is not to open attachments in emails from people you don't know. In fact I don't open attachments from people who I do know! The reason is that sometimes spammers spoof emails by other people and either have attachments or links. The fact there is no text in the email or bad grammar etc indicates the emails are fakes. I bet a lot of people get caught out when the emails are supposedly from people they know. I guess someone's email address book has been harvested and is being used by the spammers / scammers.

I've not been hit by it but I would love a sample to mess around with in a virtual machine.

Even better, do something BEFORE you get hit by a trojan like Cryptolocker!

Backup all the data on your PC and test those backups to make sure they work. Then, if you get hit by something nasty you can just wipe your hard drive, reload the operating system and restore your data.

^ That is my policy too. It also protects me from a hard disk failure or other hardware failure or Windows going completely tits up. It is rare I've had to go back to my backups, but I've sure been pleased I've got them on the couple of occasions I've needed them. If you get a nasty virus attack it is quite possible that no virus recovery software is going to get the computer back to a stable state again in which case the only solution is to wipe the hard drive and reinstall the operating system and all your software and data.