Ransomeware Scam Virus

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Posted: Thu Aug 16, 2012 11:03 am

Anyone ever hear of it? There was a story on my local news' website:

http://www.9wsyr.com/news/local/story/FBI-issues-Ransomware-scam-alert/NKyz90-zrEqJQrpsvXL5pA.cspx

Quote:

Hereâ€™s what happens: Your computer is taken over by a notice that looks like an official alert from the FBI. It accuses you of violating copyright and child porn laws, then threatens that you have to pay a fine to unlock your computer.

The FBI has more info here:

http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/august/new-internet-scam

Posted: Thu Aug 16, 2012 11:29 am

^^ Yes, it occured in Western Europe about 2 months ago.

I had to disinfect a computer from a friend with this ransomware.
Fortunately, all you have to do is performing a system restore to get rid of it.

Posted: Thu Aug 16, 2012 2:29 pm

Or format the whole HD and install Linux! Wink

*** BANNED *** Joined: 26 Jul 2012 Posts: 1123

^ pssssshhhhh..... go BSD or go home. Laughing

This kind of stuff has existed for a while. I got some at a work computer one time from a friend. The silly thing was crawling all over the network infecting other computers off of our intranet. It only got 3 out of 50 computers though.

How did it start at work...... someone was browsing a porn site. Laughing

He did not last long in that company.

Posted: Thu Aug 16, 2012 3:55 pm

I had something similar that persistently reset my homepage to a pr0n site ('honestly, darling, it wasn't me!')and disabled almost everything so I couldn't do much about it, complete with fake MS Explorer messages ( realised it was all fake when I noticed how badly worded they were) and the apparent disappearance of most of the stuff on my hard drive. The malware was offering me salvation in exchange for money, of course.

I logged onto Eater from my laptop, and followed the instructions from people who understand computers better than I do. I didn't need to reformat, but I did need to edit the registry. As I have installed Win 7 64 bit since, I no longer have a record of what anti-malware I used, but you could find the thread if you searched hard enough.

Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2012 10:09 pm

Sounds like a new twist on an old theme commonly known as "scare-ware". The old ploy was a fake virus alert, with endless popups saying that you had to pay for anti-virus download. Of course it was all bogus. Most of those malware programs are pretty sophisticated, shutting off your real anti-virus programs and making it impossible to do a system restore.

The solution was to go into 'safe mode' and download Malwarebytes. A real PITA but that did the job. After that ordeal I bought the paid version of Malwarebytes and have it running in the background all the time. It has blocked a lot of malicious sites. I also use the no-script add-on from Firefox so that I can be infected by a random script running on a malicious site, which is how I got it in the first place. (A Nigerian news site! No kidding.)

Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2012 10:28 pm

I helped a friend get some scare-ware off her netbook, they dig in deep, i ended up having to do a registry edit to get it out Shocked

i dislike doing reg edits Sad

Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 1:11 pm

I had this happen to me few weeks ago. The page that popped up purported to be from the Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit and stated that I had done one of a range of illegal things, ranging from emailing someone on their terrorist watch list, to subverting the government, and everything in between. Surprise, surprise, Â£100 sent to the Police via a payment method that looked distinctly East European, would unlock my computer and make it all go away!
I rebooted in Safe Mode where I found and deleted the culprit lurking in the Startup folder of my user profile.
It has never returned.

Hello I'm New here! Joined: 30 Sep 2013 Posts: 1

Sad but this virus is still very popular among bad guys. And it is not now enough to use Safe Mode - as recent versions of the virus do block it. One can create a separate bootable drive like USB/CD and launch antivirus scan from it. Here is an instruction on how to create a bootable USB with HitmanPro - [snip link - JF]

You don't need to buy Hitman, just scan, clean and uninstall.

Posted: Mon Sep 30, 2013 11:55 pm

Closest I've come to it was one of my Step-sons got a Malware from a pr0n site. Luckily he was in the guest session. I rebooted the computer into my Admin session and downloaded Malwarebytes. Did a full system scan and it went bye bye.

Posted: Tue Oct 01, 2013 12:08 am

Please don't necro old topics, this thread is over a year old. Please take a few moments to read 419 EATER FORUM RULES AND F.A.Q. sticky.

Quote:

Please avoid thread necromancy (that is: posting in a thread that has been inactive for several months to bump it back to the top again). Old threads have usually little relevance anymore. Also, members that posted in it may not be around anymore. If you really want to bring up an old discussion again because you have something of value to add, post a new thread and put a link in it to the old thread. That way people do not have to read through all the old posts to see what is new.