There is a very NASTY piece of malware now floating around the Internet that once installed will go in and encrypt all of your locally stored computer data. For those of you on a network with mapped drives, this malware will actually propagate to those mapped drives and encrypt that data as well. And by encrypting, they essentially hold your data hostage until you pay whatever ransom they are asking for.
It’s so new that a lot of the anti-virus solutions out are not detecting the malware before it can do its damage; but let me tell you, once it hits your computer/network, it’s a tremendous challenge to get rid of. In fact, in most cases, we simply have to resort to the latest backup and start restoring data.
Over the next days/weeks to come, please be VERY CAREFUL as to what you open up in email attachments (which is typically how the malware is obtained), to the point that if you do NOT know who the sender is, DO NOT OPEN the attachment. The attachments typically look like PDF files which requires a whole new level of awareness on your part as end-users. For more information on this particular piece of malware, please click here.
