Posted on 10/07/2016 9:09:42 AM PDT by lafroste
Hacked. My computer has been seized by ransomeware. Phone is 866 760 0416. What do I do? Can't respond just read.
The agency that needs to be notified is the FBI Computer Crimes Division but don't expect them to do much more than log your complaint and see if the phone number that pops up matches that in another case. You just become another complainant or witness on a federal case they're probably already working on.
Most ransom ware encrypts the hard drive. If that is the case you have little option other than a wipe, restore and recover from backup.
I did a system restore, and I’m back. Thank you all for your help. The original post was from my phone. That explains its brevity.
Again, how would your supposedly being hacked explain the gibberish content of your posts yesterday?
_____________________________
To: Sean_Anthony
I rued about\ 1o 10 trimness ridiculousness rerames. issue a ( a reply..p.
It’s possible I guess. That is kind of strange.
What was up when you posted what I copied to my post 24 above? Did you actually type that? Did you review it first?
I used to pay McAfee $40 bucks a year and got a couple of viruses during the 3 years, including an early ransomeware bug, early enough that I had never heard of it. I managed to get ride of the ransomware by my own efforts without cleaning the HD or restoring but it was tedious. I don’t think I could do that with the newer forms. I finally dumped McAfee and went to Malwarebytes free and have not had a virus since. After a couple years of Mbytes free I saw an offer to get paid-for-life Mbytes for $9.69 and got it. It tells me once a week or so that my Mbytes is up to date and functioning. I have become a defacto unpaid salesman for Mbytes since.
Some of the ransomeware doesn’t even stop the attack after you pay. Some of those even demand more money for a cleaner program the source is selling which, if purchased, will add more virii to the system even if it ends that particular attack.
Put out the power plug, and/or battery and restart.
I don’t remember posting that, but I do have a sleep disorder that can, at times, cause me to sleep walk, etc. So maybe I did, in a dream state. I don’t know.
Go ahead and download antispyware or malwarebites or other recommended and run them.
Some times those nasty malware can hook themselves in to a hidden directory to reactivate later.
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Next, if Windows is your OS, learn to use one of the disk imaging software programs.
Most of the software (antispyware/malwarebytes/imaging) is free for home use.
I currently use Macrium Reflect Free Home Use. Imaging has saved me many times. I can return you to your last-best system condition. You do not have to install everything from scratch. You only need to reinstall any software updates or programs added since the last-best imaging backup.
Lol! What about the typo in your current tagline?
lafroste (this is what happwns,)
Unplug or force shut down. Start up run virus scan. Some of these things are not really viruses but tracking cookies.
Good Lord. It’s fixed. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
That is not being “hacked”. Hacking is an action that is done actively. What you have is a Trojan scareware application that installs when you visit a disreputable website or a Wordpress blog that has been compromised. The site that you visited might have been hacked but you have not.
Oh, yeah. Dealing with these people is truly a last resort. Even if you do, you grab the data and slick your system and scan the heck out of the data before you reload.
The problem is that really good disk encryption is hard to break, which is fine if you're doing it deliberately on your own system but really rough if it's somebody else and they're generating random passwords. Breaking the stuff is quite beyond the average user's means if the code is any good at all. I have a proposed solution, but it involves staking the perps out on ant-hills...
Send me $1000 in cash and I’ll fix it.
Turn it off. Take out the battery if it’s a laptop. It will reload and click to go to normal or safe mode loading. Do not click to return the sites you were on.
You can also direct your computer to boot off a recovery partition, and use that to format and load a clean system on a new external hard drive. Once done, boot using the external hard drive and get your data files as you mentioned. Then you can either reformat the old drive, and do a swap of drives, or clone from the external to the old drive.
I just bought some refurbished hard drives for under $20 each to use for purposes like this. As you said, hard drives are cheap. I regularly clone my internal drives so I can boot off the external clone as needed. Makes for a clean guaranteed backup if necessary.
New user, abandon in place.
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