Let me start with a question… What is Ransomware? Ok, now to answer that question, this is a bit of software that takes over your machine and then insists you pay a ransom to have your machine back, it also prentends to be official and tries to scare you into spending money, I am sensing you have some questions about this!
Why does my anti-Virus software not detect this?
Because it is not a virus, a virus by definition has to be able to self replicate and spread, this is not the purpose of Ransomware, however it may download a virus to your machine, the Ransomware is not able to spread itself to other machines in your network, it is normally downloaded from a website or with other software.
Shall I just pay the ransom?
Most defiantly not, it won’t get removed fully and they will be back for more of your hard earned cash.
So how can I spot it?
Read the screen carefully, the gramma and spelling will be really bad (and I mean worse than mine), also think about it do you really think the police would lock your computer and ask you to pay a fine or come and wake you up at 5 in the morning for you to spend hours in a cell?
what do I do about it?
First shut down your machine, second call your local friendly IT support company, that will be us 😉 and we will be able to remove it for you.
so now it’s removed what next?
We recommend that your normal user account should be a restricted permissions account, mainly not be able to install any program’s, this then means that the nasty stuff out there cannot gain full control of your machine and will make it a lot easier to get any future attacks, yes it is a pain having to log in as a different user to install a new bit of software or run an update, but it is far
better on your bank balance.
