A new strain of ransomware is now circulating. This variant, known as “Petya” is the most dangerous to date. It is designed to encrypt the hard drive on your computer and prevent the workstation from booting. The average fee to unlock your workstation from Petya is $370.
Petya targets mostly business users, as it is distributed in spam emails that pretend to contain job applications or miscellaneous attachment.
• Please do not open any email attachments from people you don’t know.
• Please do not enable macros on email attachments from people you don’t know.
• Please use caution opening email attachments from people you do know.
• https://blog.kaspersky.com/petya-ransomware/11715/
"Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions."
__________________________________________________________________
Ted Summers
Thanks Ted S. Great and useful info......."ransomware" is becoming a big big problem around the world.......companies are being held hostage and a old russian widow was held hostage for hundreds of dollars by these criminals (national news story) and could not access her family photos until she "paid up"...these cyber criminals are ruthless!!
Nathanael Russell wrote:
A new strain of ransomware is now circulating. This variant, known as “Petya” is the most dangerous to date. It is designed to encrypt the hard drive on your computer and prevent the workstation from booting. The average fee to unlock your workstation from Petya is $370.
/
Fortunately, no one who frequents this forum is stupid enough to fall for this.
And it seems that the trojan that does the damage is a "self-extracting .exe fiile", so this appears to be Windows-specific, so far.
Nathanael Russell wrote:
A new strain of ransomware is now circulating. This variant, known as “Petya” is the most dangerous to date. It is designed to encrypt the hard drive on your computer and prevent the workstation from booting. The average fee to unlock your workstation from Petya is $370.
/
Fortunately, no one who frequents this forum is stupid enough to fall for this.
And it seems that the trojan that does the damage is a "self-extracting .exe fiile", so this appears to be Windows-specific, so far.
I would agree to your statement; however, it is always good to be informed.
Nathanael Russell wrote:
A new strain of ransomware is now circulating. This variant, known as “Petya” is the most dangerous to date. It is designed to encrypt the hard drive on your computer and prevent the workstation from booting. The average fee to unlock your workstation from Petya is $370.
/
Fortunately, no one who frequents this forum is stupid enough to fall for this.
And it seems that the trojan that does the damage is a "self-extracting .exe fiile", so this appears to be Windows-specific, so far.
I would agree to your statement; however, it is always good to be informed.
Actually, I'm not sure I would agree with my statement.
Nathanael Russell wrote:
A new strain of ransomware is now circulating. This variant, known as “Petya” is the most dangerous to date. It is designed to encrypt the hard drive on your computer and prevent the workstation from booting. The average fee to unlock your workstation from Petya is $370.
/
Fortunately, no one who frequents this forum is stupid enough to fall for this.
And it seems that the trojan that does the damage is a "self-extracting .exe fiile", so this appears to be Windows-specific, so far.
I would agree to your statement; however, it is always good to be informed.
Actually, I'm not sure I would agree with my statement.
You should always keep backups of everything, preferably on an external drive (or, better, several drives). Of course backing up your personal files with a tool such as fbackup:
will help against loss from viruses or hardware failure but won't protect you from having your machine locked by a virus. For that you need something more serious, and I'm afraid a little more techy. CloneZilla is a free disk cloning program that lets you take a snapshot of your drive to an external (USB) hard drive.
I don't change my PC much so make an image every year or so. If I get hit by ransomware I'll just restore that image, reload my backup files and reinstall anything I added over the year. Most program and system updates for the year will take care of themselves automatically.
I'm sure there are other tools out there that do the same things, I'm just familiar with the two I mentioned.
