Lock It Up, or Get Locked Out!

The US and the UK are motivated to take down Gameover Zeus and CryptoLocker, with the United States police force launching a global investigation and finding a Russian citizen they believe to have created it, while the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency reported an international operation disrupted the virus for two weeks and gave the citizens time to clean up their computers and safeguard them from threats.

Both countries will tell you, however, the threat remains.  And here at the Help Desk of Pronets, we can tell you the same.  Our users have top of the line security software, virus scans are run on every system nightly which detect and clear infections, all security patches and critical updates are applied and checked for completion, and still CryptoLocker rears its ugly head.  So the question is why? This malware is making its way onto our users systems as email attachments.  These email attachments are opened by the user, and usually look pretty harmless – in one case, it even looked pertinent to the business.  But, make no mistake, the virus will launch the executable hidden in the seemingly harmless attachment and it will attack. 

To keep from getting infected, make sure that Pronets has the opportunity to do its job for your computer.  Leave your computer on at night for its virus scan, let the computer complete its updates, and above all do not open strange email attachments. 

And, just in case your organization does get infected, make sure you have a good backup of your data.  Files cannot be restored, only recovered from a backup.  Disengage the backup as soon as you see it.  Remove the network connection to your computer because the virus looks for drives to attack.  The idea is to protect the backup and the server as quickly as possible.  Call us immediately if you see it, and get up from your seat and immediately warn everyone to disconnect from your network.  Pronets reacts very quickly to assess the damage, contain the virus, and get you back to working order as soon as possible.  Do not underestimate this virus.