Ransomware Unlocked

There have been an increasing number of 'Ransomware' viruses around on the internet over the last few years. They are very effective as they block access to your most important documents, photos, music files and videos and many people are prepared to pay large sums of money to get them back. After all, you can't go back and take those weddings photos or pictures of your children growing again. And the thought of having to re-write school coursework or a thesis is more than most people can bear. Encryption is a very secure form of protection for files and can be used legitimately to protect your own files as you will know the password. However, when a hacker locks them with an unknown password, there is almost no way to regain access as this is the whole point of encryption!

Now several major companies have come together to offer a light at the end of the tunnel. Europol's European Cybercrime Centre, Intel, Kaspersky and others have worked together to collate what information is known about these viruses and for some variants they have been able to reverse engineer them and offer a fix. This means, in some cases, you may be able to get your files back without having to pay the criminals. We can not stress enough that we NEVER endorse paying to regain access to your files as it does 2 very bad things. Firstly it proves that their software is working and the more responses they get the more people they know it has hit. Secondly it funds their criminal activities allowing them to spend more time developing more advanced techniques to target even more people.

If you have been a victim of one of these viruses, visit www.nomoreransom.org. This is the site developed by the companies mentioned above. Here you can upload 2 of your encrypted files and the html or txt document the virus leaves behind with instructions on how to get them unlocked and this should allow the website to search it's database and identify the type of virus you have been hit with. If it has a repair tool, it will point you to it with instructions on how to use it and hopefully recover your files. If it doesn't don't despair. We believe this website will continue to be updated as more information is discovered, so even if there isn't a fix now there may be something available in future.

Finally, prevention is definitely better than cure! If you've been a victim then you'll know how painful it is to lose your files. If you haven't then just imagine no longer being able to see photos of your children growing up, deceased relatives, your household accounts spreadsheet, invoices etc. etc. The very best way to protect yourself from these viruses is backup! This is something everyone should be doing anyway, but we know that's not the reality. As an absolute minimum, make sure you have a copy of important files in at least 2 places. This can be CDs, DVDs, USB Flash drive or external hard drive. None of these methods, however, are infallible. Any of these methods could fail and unless you check them regularly you may not find out they've failed until you need them and then it's too late. This can be mitigated by making a 3rd copy, but where do you stop? The best backup method is online. This gives you a copy away from home or work, so can't be affected by fire, flood or burglary. The companies running these online data centres will be automatically making multiple copies for you in case their hardware should have any issues. And they have the added bonus of keeping previous versions of your files. If your external hard drive is connected to your computer when the encryption virus hits, then your backup will be encrypted as well and all of your hard work will be immediately undone. Online backups will keep up to 30 previous versions of your files, so even if the encrypted version gets uploaded, you will still have access to the version of the file from before the encryption happened.

We've teamed up with iDrive to offer you a special discount when you sign up. Simply visit www.idrive.com/p=abscomputers26 and choose the package with the amount of storage you require. Rather than charge you by device, with iDrive you pay for the total amount of storage you need, then you can install it on as many PCs, Macs, tablets and phones as you need.

If you have any questions at all about ransomeware, viruses or backups then get in touch and we'll answer them for you.

Thank you for reading and feel free to leave any comments and share this with anyone you think might find it useful.

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