Post by scrapnnana on Aug 25, 2015 11:37:37 GMT
DS has a brand new computer, just one month old. It came with a year sub to McAfee, which appears useless, since it didn't help at all. He upgraded to Windows 10 as soon as he could.
DS was trying to get some info on a role playing game and did a Google search. He clicked on a link, and immediately an external source started downloading something to his computer. He tried to stop it without success. I told him to download Malwarebytes to see if it would get rid of it. As soon as he tried to do that, a big red window popped up saying not to close the window, his files were locked, and he could not free his computer till he called a certain phone number. NO way we're we going to pay blackmail to the creeps! (DH later said that they can't always unlock your files, anyway.)
At the point the red warning screen showed up, I was in the room and told him to force a shutdown immediately, which he did. Then I went to the Microsoft site and printed off instructions to refresh to an earlier time, as well as other repairs in case that didn't work. It didn't work, so we did a reinstall to wipe it clean, which did work. Before we turned his computer back on, we shut off our internet, so that when we turned his computer on, we could do what we needed without worrying if the malware creeps were reloading crap onto his computer as fast as we could remove it.
I don't know if this has happened to anyone else here, but thankfully, my son had very little on his computer and had backed up the one important thing onto a thumb drive which had NOT been connected at the time his computer got taken over by the pirates. He was so grateful that he had his files backed up, and the reinstall worked. Nothing was left behind. With the reinstall, he had the option to go back to the original operating system or Windows 10. He chose to go back to 8.1, in case the malware took advantage of a Windows 10 weakness. Windows 10 seemed to be slower for him, anyway. Mainly, he wanted to be sure that everything unwanted was gone.
Has anyone else had their computer files locked by malware, and if so, how did you deal with it? Is there are better way? Obviously I am going to go back up everything on my computer, to external drives, which I haven't done in awhile. The idea of reinstalling the operating system for my computer kind of makes me ill, though, so I'd love to know if there is a better way of dealing with a situation like this than the way we did it.
Please share your stories of this issue, regardless. We can't be the only ones this has happened to.
DS was trying to get some info on a role playing game and did a Google search. He clicked on a link, and immediately an external source started downloading something to his computer. He tried to stop it without success. I told him to download Malwarebytes to see if it would get rid of it. As soon as he tried to do that, a big red window popped up saying not to close the window, his files were locked, and he could not free his computer till he called a certain phone number. NO way we're we going to pay blackmail to the creeps! (DH later said that they can't always unlock your files, anyway.)
At the point the red warning screen showed up, I was in the room and told him to force a shutdown immediately, which he did. Then I went to the Microsoft site and printed off instructions to refresh to an earlier time, as well as other repairs in case that didn't work. It didn't work, so we did a reinstall to wipe it clean, which did work. Before we turned his computer back on, we shut off our internet, so that when we turned his computer on, we could do what we needed without worrying if the malware creeps were reloading crap onto his computer as fast as we could remove it.
I don't know if this has happened to anyone else here, but thankfully, my son had very little on his computer and had backed up the one important thing onto a thumb drive which had NOT been connected at the time his computer got taken over by the pirates. He was so grateful that he had his files backed up, and the reinstall worked. Nothing was left behind. With the reinstall, he had the option to go back to the original operating system or Windows 10. He chose to go back to 8.1, in case the malware took advantage of a Windows 10 weakness. Windows 10 seemed to be slower for him, anyway. Mainly, he wanted to be sure that everything unwanted was gone.
Has anyone else had their computer files locked by malware, and if so, how did you deal with it? Is there are better way? Obviously I am going to go back up everything on my computer, to external drives, which I haven't done in awhile. The idea of reinstalling the operating system for my computer kind of makes me ill, though, so I'd love to know if there is a better way of dealing with a situation like this than the way we did it.
Please share your stories of this issue, regardless. We can't be the only ones this has happened to.
