General Category > General Discussion
Be careful out there, newer virus highly dangerous.
palmer6strings:
Ok guys, just letting you know, there is a fairly new virus out called the "FBI moneypak virus". It is ransomeware and looks really legit. I'm just putting it out there so everyone will be careful because it WILL eat through firewalls, antivirus programs, and mallware filters.
I unfortunately got it yesterday and it screwed my world up and can't even get into safe mode to try to fix it. :(
No covers for me until I get it all fixed. Sad days...
larryinc64:
I heard about this in my PC class, how exactly do you think you got it?
Heilman11085:
He probably got it from torrent sites or something. Is this the one that says the FBI has tracked your downloads and says you must pay up or go to jail? I've seen that before, it's way bogus for several reasons. First the FBI would never have a pop up, if anything they would contact your ISP and have your internet subscription suspended and then subpoena you for a court date. And the government and MPAA RIAA and others really are targeting uploaders not downloaders. I personally don't even use antivirus because most virus go undetected anyway. I do however factory restore my computer about once every 3 months and keep all my files and such on an external hard drive.
dneill:
I'm a computer Tech. I remove this infection all the time for my customers. I can help anyone out that has trouble with it.
sheep2001:
--- Quote from: Heilman11085 on March 14, 2013, 07:37:09 PM ---I personally don't even use antivirus because most virus go undetected anyway. I do however factory restore my computer about once every 3 months and keep all my files and such on an external hard drive.
--- End quote ---
Not sure how you believe they MOSTLY go undetected. Once a new virus is identified it is added to the definitions file, and will generally be similar enough to most variants to at least give you a warning. Only the very latest ones will not be detected.
And do you think a virus can't attack an external drive? You are playing Russian roulette if you are not using any antivirus software. Chances are you're already infected, even after a factory restore, if you have an infection on your backup drives you are just reinfect ing yourself straight away. Not all viruses will make themselves apparent straight away, they could be date or event triggered. I would scan everything ASAP if I were you.
I had a similar infection to this last year (but with a French gendarmes warning instead of FBI) and at the same time another virus which encoded every file on my computer, my external media drive, and a media player which was connected wirelessly, but had the drive mapped across the network. Not sure how I got them, but it happened in the 30 minutes I had disabled my antivirus software while trouble shooting the PC.
Eventually managed to get everything back, but I thought I had lost all my encoded movies, music and photos. If you don't have access to a 2nd uninflected computer to download all the removal tools, you're pretty screwed.