Computer viruses can (and do) devastate thousands of companies every day. Some are relatively harmless, doing nothing more than redirecting your browser or turning your PC into a spam-spewing geyser. Others are not so harmless. They can render your PC, and therefore the hard-earned data it contains, irreparable – the only course of action is to reformat and restore from backup… uh, you DO have a backup, right?
So there are two courses of action to consider. One is how to prevent a virus from infecting your PC in the first place and the second is what to do if your PC does acquire a virus.
Virus Prevention
There are three golden rules when it comes to viruses and email.
- Attachments are not your friend
- Viruses can read contact lists in email programs
- Sometimes links do not go where you think they’re going
So many times a virus causes havoc, and simultaneously replicating itself, by posing as an innocent email with an attachment from one of your friends. “Oh, what’s Bob sending me this time?” and before you know it, you’re trying to explain to your IT Support person what happened next. Never open an attachment unless you know in advance what it is. Even if you know the person sending it, a good and cheap insurance policy is to call and ask, “Hey, did you just send me this?” Never blindly click on a link in an email without doing a little investigation. Both of those defensive methods will save you a lot of grief later on.
These days not having an anti-virus program installed on your PC is just irresponsible. Microsoft Windows 8 and 10 both come with Windows Defender installed and while that’s good, a lot of times it’s just not good enough. Windows Defender is not one of the more robust packages. There are several free packages that do better and there are subscription based anti-virus programs that do better still.
While we’re on the subject of installing packages, malware can sometimes be just as annoying and counterproductive as a virus. Malware clogs up your PC’s resources – CPU, disk, network, etc – and can sneak its way in from a variety of ways. A regular scan from a malware program such as Malwarebytes will help clean out malware.
Virus Recovery
We have had companies hit by the exact same virus and their recovery options were at opposite ends of the spectrum. The virus in particular was Cryptowall, a nasty piece of ransomware that, once activated, works in the background encrypting your files. When it finishes it displays a windows similar to the following: 
It’s called ransomware because the program says that for a fee they will send you an encryption key so you can recover your files. But even if that would work, which many businesses have had mixed results, law enforcement all over the world will oftentimes shut down the payment method the program says for you to use. So even if you wanted to pay and even if it was a legitimate way to recover your data, it will not work.
As stated, we have assisted businesses who have had experience with this type of virus. The first company had nightly backups and we were able to restore their business’ databases to what they were at close of business the previous day. They lost virtually nothing, a couple hours work that was easily re-entered in a matter of minutes.
The second company was not so fortunate. The virus came in through email on one PC and then jumped to a mapped drive on their server… where all their customer data resided. They did not think a backup solution was a necessary expenditure and they lost everything. This was almost two years ago and they are still struggling to recover everything that was encrypted. On the plus side they now have a managed, subscription-based anti-virus program monitoring all of their desktops, laptops, and server but what a lesson to learn the hard way.
Contact us today to learn how we can help you implement steps to prevent viruses from destroying your data or quarantine and recover from viruses already on your computer.