Incidents of the Cryptowall 3.0 ransomware are increasing on campus.
• DO NOT open .ZIP attachments. (recent incidents reported had a .ZIP attachment with the subject “my resume”)
• Stay away from unknown, suspicious or unofficial websites and torrents offering game, movie or software downloads and DO NOT click on any pop-ups.
This ransomware infects your PC when you visit lesser known websites and particularly if you download games, movies and software or click on attachments in your e-mail, for example zip files.
The ransomware copies all the data on your hard drive, encrypts and deletes it and you’re left with gibberish. A ransom fee is demanded, but the odds that you’ll get your data back at all, are slim.
Cryptowall not only infects your own hard drive data, if also targets all drives you are connected to, including your shared departmental drive. You will lose the data on your hard drive and data on the network drive might be able to be recovered up to a certain point, but unfortunately this can’t be guaranteed.
Report suspect email to sysadm@sun.ac.za. Also read more on how to spot malicious e-mails.
