Today’s bad news, for anyone who might need the caution:
Oh joy…malware that encrypts your data…you either pay the ransom or you loose the data (if it’s not backed up)
They need to pull those hackers fingernails out with pliers for that!
Keep good antivirus, good malware protection, keep winderz updated regularly, and don’t open unknown email links or attachments…
other than that…good luck…unless you have Mac OS or Linux
Ransomware is making a huge comeback in the last year.
Use Acronis true image, and email them a big middle finger as payment 
This is the reason why I have setup a server in my basement as cloud storage. I have no important files or pictures stored on my main PC. Easy wipe and reload from my image software and I am good to go.
I have 52 gigs on my dropbox…off site storage is a bit safer…but costs a pretty penny
I need to build me a few TB Raid-5 (or FreeNAS) NAS server…
Sandboxie is pretty good in isolating rogue software, although it doesn’t eliminate the need for good backups. 
Last year, Two of our computers at work got hit with this type of attack. But, we use off site servers for some work, and back up of local daily work on thumb drives. Thumb drives go in a fireproof safe over night. Of course the 2 employees hadn’t followed the rules. They opened the phish email promising the old $100 Walmart card trick, then clicked the link. And of course they had not backed up their stuff for 3 days.
We had to reload windows to get it gone. It got past Kapersky Antivirus (not sure if I spelled that right).
On April 21 of this year I got hit with the Crypto Locker ransom ware. I noticed a constant tremendous load on my 4 core PC and knew something was up after a few hours. Cyrpto Locker was going after my mp3’s, jpg’s and doc files and encrypting each file. There is NO way out of this. They wanted 1 Bit Coin for the encryption key, about $600 at that time.
Good thing everything I have is backed up. Only the most recent files were not, but fortunatly it had not reached those yet. It went after files on external drives first, presumably less likely to affect files the user would immediately notice.
I was still using XP and support for it had expired from MicroSoft, including MS Security Essentials. This incident encouraged me to switch over the Windows 7.
Looking back on it after having read up on it, I realized the infection came when I did a search on lawn fungus and opened a PDF file from a site called “All Season Landscaping”. I remember the name because it was mentioned in info on Crypto Locker and the name was similar to a local power equipment dealer I use.
I have been noticing that when i am away from the comptuer for a few mins cpu utilization goes to 100% until i move the mouse or use the keyboard, and the application using the CPU is Windows Modules Installer Worker, i tried looking up online (earlier today actually) why but had no luck, i hope its not ransomware.
Bort, ransomeware is immediate and doesnt stay dormant.
dchomak, that sucks! Some PDF files seem really malicious.
Bort, that might be a background Windows updater running. I would backup any important files to an offsite place through, HDD/USB, etc. I wouldn’t worry too much about the Windows Modules Installer Worker process through, unless it’s well disguised.
My windows 7 PC has tremendous disk activity when the simple screen blanker kicks in. What’s that all about?
Drives me crazy!
I still don’t get it though, the flag on the bottom right gets a timer on it (windows 8), cpu usage goes to 100% and the cpu fan revs up because of the extra heat generated and won’t stop until i use the mouse or keyboard, and its been doing this for the past week, probably a dozen times a day or more.
I have not backed up in a week or so, i’ll do it tomorrow, i use an external USB hard drive.
What can PDF files do? I use foxit reader and its updated.
Could be a background virus scan, defragmenter (HDDs only), or a backup service? An anti-virus scan from a well known brand can help, although Ricflair said the ransomware got past kaspersky.
What happens if you put your cursor over the flag? It might tell you some additional information. I’m guessing a Windows Update gone bad and running over and over again.
dchomak said that he got infected with ransomware when he opened a malicious PDF file. I thought this was quite rare and haven’t met anyone with it.
The fundamental problem here is, very few people will take the time and insignificant effort to “safe up” their Wintel PCs. In this case, what you probably have is a file called Whatever.PDF.EXE with a PDF icon. When you double-click (or single-click if you’ve gone off the deep end of the lazy-user settings) the file, you think you’re opening a PDF, but Windows thinks you’re executing an EXE. Guess which one of your belief systems (yours or Windows’) wins.
And since the .EXE part is just a wrapper, your Windows File Association is honored & the wrapped PDF you wanted is shown in the foreground, as the wrapper inserts its payload behind the screens.
OTOH, if you configure Windows to show you the extension of all files, and configure your browser to Always Ask what to do with any files other than HTML and JPEG or GIF, these “wrappers” become much easier to spot. Actually, most browsers are reasonably good at telling the difference between a “.PDF” and a “.PDF.EXE” file and will launch a PDF reader or a “where do you want to save this program?” dialog appropriately.
A colorful metaphor would be cutting a hole in the bank vault because dialing in the combination every time you want to get in is just too darned inconvenient.
Sorry, but comfort and convenience come at a mighty steep price. You either give up your Security or you give up your Time to learning how to secure yourself.
It is quite rare to see ransomeware, but in the last year i have seen 6 incidents of it on Purdue University campus.
Convenience and Security are on opposite ends of a sliding scale. Somewhere in the middle is your computer. Most Windows computers are a lot closer to the Convenience side of the scale, because that’s what most users demand. A totally secure computer is one that cannot be used for anything at all, because the biggest security risk is between the keyboard and the chair! But, with a little patience and discipline, you can learn to adapt to a more secure computing environment. It’s like learning to control your eating or spending habits.
I have a Chromebook, so I am almost immune to almost any attack. So all you PC users can eat my shorts. I have all my bookmarks and files on a flash drive, so I can simply wipe it, no harm/no foul.
(don’t get me started on Google’s data collection though)
FYI, a chromebook is just using chromium as a operating system, and it comes with all the limitations that entails. (IE web browsing only)
some smart kid installed a ransomware virus on our common drive at our high school. IT took a month to get rid of it. It was fun to watch the resulting chaos.
The tradeoff between convenience and security isn’t strictly linear. Good design (at many levels) can help achieve an optimal balance.
An example of bad design is how microsoft dealt with getting the user to improve privilege escalation during a task like software installation. Back in the Vista days (i’m not sure Win7 was any better), you might get a challenge dialog multiple times during the installation of a single piece of software. This trains the user that security is annoying, and encourages them to click to approve the dialogs mindlessly. Maware authors found multiple ways to exploit that training, for example, throwing up lots of fake dialogs in internet explorer in order to conceal a few genuine dialogs. Users would frantically click to get rid of the popups, and in the process, approve the installation of malware.
An example of good design is Apple’s approach to the same issue on OSX. The user gets challenged once during the installation of a software package, or changes to an important setting. The challenge requires that they enter their password, which helps focus their attention. Because they only have to enter it once, and they have been trained to expect that they only have to enter it once, the password requirement isn’t a major annoyance.
That said, I’m sure we’ll see more Mac-targeted malware, over time.
I don’t actually mess around with antivirus. I do a scan once every few months, but pretty much all its ever found is some windows malware hiding in email attachments, so I’ve never bothered with scheduled or real-time scans… Backup software though… I back up my computer two different ways to three or more locations, at least one of which is off-site. These backups happen at frequent intervals whenever I am connected to a network with Internet access. This is backup software, not cloud storage. It maintains multiple backups stretching back, at this point, years, which protects against corruption in little used files.
Bort there are lots of things that could be causing your CPU to spike when you aren’t using the computer. In addition to backups and defragmentation, which someone already mentioned, there is indexing the files on your disk for quick search.