It’s not often we get calls over the festive period, however this year started with some clients with big problems.
“Your Machine has been locked by the Police”
A call came in at 20:50 on New Years Eve from a distressed user saying that her computer had been “locked” by the Police and a payment needed to be made to allow use.
We advised her to turn the machine off and not to use it until we had had a chance to see whether it was a fake ransomware infection or whether it had actually encrypted and locked her data.
Our advice on keeping it turned off was unfortunately ignored, and the client was quite alarmed by the fact that every browser and user login on the machine was now infected.
Running the machine through some anti-virus tools, in this case our handy AVG Rescue CD, we managed to identify the infection and luckily it was not as malicious as we first thought.
A few hours later, the machine was clean, updated, defragged and returned to a very grateful and relieved owner.
