Sophos Cloud Optix
No type of malware seems to get people’s blood boiling quite as much as ransomware.
That’s the malware that abruptly locks you out of your computer or your files, and demands that you pay a fee to get back in.
Sophos security expert Chester Wisniewski joins Paul Ducklin in an informative and educational podcast that answers the three key questions about ransomware:
- What is it?
- How does it work?
- What can we do about it?
(Audio player above not working? Download, or listen on Soundcloud.)
Other Techknow episodes you might like
- Sophos Techknow – Firewalls Demystified
- Sophos Techknow – Understanding Botnets
- Sophos Techknow – The End of XP
- Sophos Techknow – Understanding Vulnerabilities
- Sophos Techknow – Two-factor Authentication
- Sophos Techknow – All about Java
- Sophos Techknow – Understanding SSL
- Sophos Techknow – Patching: lead, follow, or get out of the way?
- Sophos Techknow – Busting Password Myths
Find and remove malware with the free Sophos Virus Removal Tool
This is a simple and straightforward tool for Windows users. It works alongside your existing anti-virus to find and get rid of any threats lurking on your computer.
It does its job without requiring you to uninstall your incumbent product first. (Removing your main anti-virus just when you are concerned about infection is risky in its own right.)
Download and run it, wait for it to grab the very latest updates from Sophos, and then let it scan through memory and your hard disk. If it finds any threats, you can click a button to clean them up.
I downloaded the last version to my regret, it found viruses and removed them…only…some were not viruses.
This prog needs an iinterupt so you can choose what to delete instead of deleting all it finds,.
If you had a bunch of viruses (it sounds as though you had multiple infections that you didn’t know about), how do you know that some of what we found “were not viruses”?
Maybe you can tell us how you worked out that some of the files weren’t viruses?
(The Virus Removal Tool is intended to keep things straightforward: a button for “detect” and a button, *once you have seen the results*, for “remove”. So I’m sorry for your experience, but I think it’s pretty obvious, when you click the cleanup button, that it’s going to remove everything it’s just reported without asking you one-by-one. That’s what most users are after: a Virus Removal Tool that doesn’t expect them to choose for themselves which files are viruses and which ones aren’t.)
Had this happen a few times, did the following: Turned power off to cause a Crash when started again, computer went into Safe mode, selected Safe with internet then used Sophos Virus Removal Tool. Worked GREAT! Of course it was the old version of Ransomware. Have no idea if it will work on the new version.
As explained in the podcast, there are two main flavours of ransomware.
Screen lockers shut you out of the computer, but your files are otherwise intact.
Cryptoransomware, on the other hand, leaves your computer running fine, but your files are shredded cabbage, and only the crooks have the decryption key.