If you haven’t heard of the CryptoLocker virus then you really should read on. This rather nasty virus is usually acquired by opening an email attachment which then embeds it’s secret code deep inside your computer. It then starts to silently encrypt ALL your data files including but not limitied to pictures, word documents, spreadsheets, pdf, emails etc. The virus encrypts your files using a virtually unbreakable RSA encryption algorithm and then demands a ransom of $100 to $500 USD in exchange for decrypting your files. Furthermore, if you don’t pay by a strict time limit, they permanently throw away the decryption key.

After the initial data encryption on your system hard drive, the virus searches out and encrypts data files on ANY online storage device, whether that is a powered on external hard drive, a USB stick, a NAS or network attached storage device, or heaven forbidden every shared folder on a network.

The first indication you are infected, is when you are greeted with a popup ransom note similar to the one displayed below. To do the most damage, the ransom note doesn’t appear until the encryption has completed, which can be anywhere from a few hours to a few days depending on how much data the virus has access to.

This particular virus has been around for a few years and appears to becoming even more rampant, to the point that copycat viruses are now popping up. We have received numerous enquiries for assistance in recovering the data, but I’m sorry to say we can’t help other than to offer advice.

The good news is that the virus can be kept at bay by any user who is very vigilant about not opening any email attachments unless they are known to be 100% safe and from a trusted source. The best advice we can give is to suggest everyone keep a backup of your data on an offline or powered off external hard drive. That way nothing can touch it.

The bad news is that once you are infected, there is NO way to decrypt the data without the decryption key. Even with present computing speeds, brute force methods would take over 1000 years to crack it.

Unfortunately, and against any moral compass, we would recommend that you pay the ransom and hope the kidnappers will be honorable enough to decrypt your data. We have heard and read stories on the web of people paying the ransom and getting their data decrypted successfully. But unfortunately, we have also heard stories of people paying the ransom and getting nothing.

If you have had any experience with this virus, please comment and share your knowledge with all our readers.