The most common way your computer becomes infected with cryptolocker is in fact through harmless looking email attachments. It’s important to note that this virus must be downloaded to infect your computer, so avoiding all suspicious websites or email attachments is a major first step in self-protection. Though the ends results are the same, you may fall prey to the cryptolocker ransomware attack in a few different ways. And having people like the experts at Advanced Network Professionals on your side can give you more confidence that you have options to defend your information and fight back. Protecting yourself from this form of malware attack is crucial. Once infected, users have few options to recover their data and are left with the difficult choice of giving into the hacker’s demands. The method by which this virus facts your computer ensures that only the hacker can decrypt your data and makes it virtually impossible to recover forensically. Shortly after you’ve downloaded the virus, you’ll receive one of those gut-wrenching alerts letting you know your machine has been infected and a timer will appear counting down until your files are deleted.

Once your files have been “locked” through a two-pronged process known as asymmetric encryption, where the only way to decrypt your data is through a unique key held by the hacker, the cryptolocker virus will begin displaying messages on your computer warning you that your data will be deleted unless you pay a ransom.

This Trojan horse primarily targets computers running windows. This particular virus looks for files on your computer or any attached media – USB memory sticks, shared drives, or external hard drives, for example – to encrypt. Cryptolocker is a type of malware, malicious software intended to harm your computer, called ransomware that first showed up in 2013.

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