Cryptowall takes over my computer
So….. Turns out the NHS, Fedex and a number of other companies and organisations have been hit by this same Ransomwear virus.
According to Avast, (who I use), there have been infections in 99 countries in the last 2 days.
Apparently, the NHS are still using windows XP on their computers. A 12 year old operating system.
Windows stopped patching XP on April 8, 2014.
That means it’s a sitting duck for systems using XP.
On my cloudflare account, most attacks come from XP computers, simply because they are so easy to commandeer and bend to the wills of evil hackers.
How to fight ransomwear?
If you, like I, did a search on this, “how to fight ransomwear, get rid of it from your computer”, it turns up a number of companies claiming to be able to ‘fix’ your system for exorbitant amounts of money.
I’ve done my own guide to removing ransomwear from your computer.
It works pretty well.
It worked when I got randsomwear, and you can find it here. My guide to removing ransomwear from your computer.
Below.
Article.
Cryptowall, ever heard of it? I hadn’t until tonight…
…. Watching Lost this evening… I went to open up VLC player, and I noticed that it was taking a long time to start-up.
Opening Process Explorer, I saw the SVChost, (a common windows task), in explorer.exe taking up around 4% of CPU.
Thought nothing of it. I know SVChost runs in the background carrying out important tasks for the operating system.
Watched Lost, (Series 4 Episode 8, ‘The shape of things to come’), as I finished, this PNG was displaying on Windows picture preview.
I’d not opened this file. It was telling me Cryptowall, whilst I was watching lost, had encrypted all the files on my computer using RSA-2048 encryption.
My Pictures Library now looks like this…. …