The Cryptolocker virus - a sure way to ruin your day

Early June the Cryptolocker virus went public and the threat of the latest wave of computer viruses was signalled with a 2 week warning. The grace period has now passed and this nasty virus is roaming the internet desperate to ruin your day and impregnate your data. The customer experience results in all of us now being super cautious while opening email for fear one of these could be riddled with this disease. The guidelines on avoidance are consistent with previous viruses in not opening up any email that looks suspicious in terms of the sender or content. In particular avoiding emails with files or zipped content which may be fostering the crytolocker virus. Once inside your system it encrypts your data files and then holds you to ransom to have this unlocked but it is extremely difficult to then determine if the virus has been removed or if you are sitting on a time bomb waiting for the next ransom request from your PC. Unfortunately the experience is painful and potentially expensive which means until this gremlin has passed the experience for all of us is to proceed with extreme caution.