Jim Kotan's Blog

My blog to talk about a variety of "stuff"

Thursday, December 26, 2019

"Oh, no, what is happening to my computer???" "What do you mean, I've been hit with Ransomware?"

Just this morning, I was working with a company here in the US and learned that their servers had been hit by the "RYK Ransomware Virus".   This starts by renaming your files so their file "extension" is changed from TXT, or EML, or XLSX, or DOCX, etc., to now have a ".RYK" appended to the end...  The files are then encrypted, which results in every one of them now being unusable.   Gone.   Forever...  UNLESS you pay the bad guys a ransom in a currency called "BitCoin"..    Then there is still no guarantee that they will give you a valid key that restores your files..  In fact, many will not.

SO, you need an Antivirus software that gives you Anti-Ransomware capabilities..  I am sure there are others, but the product I use (about $20.00 per Year) is Avast Antivirus PRO.. 
AND you need to make regular backups of everything on your computer to an external source.  I personally use Carbonite, but there are many out there...

Whatever you use, be certain you are protected...

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