CarrionCrow: Yes, I did. Bought an external hard drive, got everything backed up, then reformatted.
Weird thing is, despite using every scan that I saw mentioned as a way to kill the virus, nothing was ever shown as being present.
It seems ridiculously optimistic to think that I somehow managed to dodge getting it, but aside from the initial ransomware scam bullshit screen, I never had a problem.
Never got locked out, never had to fix the problem via USB-installed program or recovery CD.
Very odd.
Ah well. Spent most of my spare coin on the hard drive, but I'd been needing to do that for a while now.
How's your day going aside from debating whether or not to turn the AC on?
EndreWhiteMane: I've had pop-ups of that type at work a few times, I was able to remove them as long as no one clicked on them. Fortunately I have the people at work trained to scream at me before they click anything they haven't seen before.
Doing fine here other than it's getting pretty warm, nowhere near ready to turn the air on though. ;)
Edit: I do have 4 games I'm trying to decide between.
Anna, Serpent in the Staglands, Wings of Glory and Vessel.
Only buying one of them this month so I need to decide what mood I'm in. :-)
Edit edit: I meant Wings of Prey. :/
That sounds a lot like a sort of browser based worm. so long as the page is not clicked, the javascript worm won't start.
It could be exactly what Endre says. As ridiculous as it sounds, it could be an extremely lazy virus coder that actually requires user authorization to infect. You hide the button or mislabel it and basically the user clicks yes to the installation of the virus. It sounds Incredibly lazy, but why bother devoting effort trying to circumvent UAC (which is not really difficult ro jump over) or any security measures you might have if you can rely on a user's ignorance and/or panic to do it for you.
I've heard of scare stories of worms that can gain superuser rights simply by loading an image with extra code that will cause a buffer overflow on the web browser. Fortunately most of the time the people who know these dangerous hacks are the same that make them public and point them out.
of the time.
Wings of prey looks gorgeous.
