Blissful ignorance

So anyway, there I was, happily going about my business, enjoying life and all the wide-ranging benefits of this amazing technology we call the internet, blissfully unaware that I was just about to be hit by a stinging virus attack. Ouch! The dark, ugly side of the internet resurfaced once again, a side I’d heard from in the past and gradually become more and more complacent about. Well, being complacent can so easily be your downfall, as I was about to find out.

A while ago I’d found a really good backup facility, and I used it. I created a full backup of my system. I felt good about that! Then, foolishly, I had forgotten all about it, as though what I had done was enough. Mmm … big mistake!

And I had been using a really useful little program called TypeItIn, which enables you to enter any previously recorded text at the click of a button. Very handy! I mean, really handy! I had built up quite a collection of boilerplate texts, everything from standard replies to regular email enquiries to the complete texts of various poems I had been trying to memorise, plus it was handy to start programs and applications from. And a bunch of other stuff I can’t even remember right now. Like I say, very handy to have at your fingertips. Handy to have … annoying (to say the least) to lose.

And I kept most of my stuff on an external hard drive. Much safer there, clear of the main system. I felt good about that too. But, probably like many people, I got careless as time went on and I sometimes left it connected for longer than necessary.

Then the virus hit me …

Not Boom! like a big explosion, more like the gentle fizzing of a slow burning fuse … and one that was quiet enough to be ignored. I was extra busy at the time, with all kinds of non-computer-related stuff, and when I saw a message onscreen that all my files had been encrypted, I didn’t really take any notice. It’s okay, I know how stupid that sounds … I mean, if anything should make you sit up and take notice, surely this should. Any rational person would stop what they were doing and take careful note of such a thing. I didn’t. Well, like I said, I was very busy. Mmm. In fact I didn’t take it seriously at all. To be honest, I just ignored it 🙁

The message I saw was similar to this one

You know why? Because the message was in the form of an image that had replaced my desktop wallpaper, and it looked so amateurish and badly designed. The text looked too big and badly put together, the colours looked all wrong, the whole thing looked garish and … well, silly really. Like it had been put together by a kid (I’m probably just making excuses now, but there it is, there’s nothing left but to scrabble around looking for excuses after doing something so stupid).

Like, as though the people who put out these viruses are really concerned about a promoting a professional image! Gimme a break! Somehow I don’t think that’s high on their list of priorities. But, for some unaccountable reason, it made me think it was some half-brained attempt to spook me. A bit like those things a ‘friend’ can put on your computer when your back’s turned, so that at after a predetermined time you’ll start to see pop-ups saying your computer has crashed. Yeah, I know, they’re real side-splitters, those things … nothing more likely to give me a good hearty laugh than a pop-up like that, or a fake Blue Screen of Death. Ha-ha, yeah, I’m sure. Stop it, my sides hurt.

Well, it didn’t look like a virus …

Anyway, since I took no real notice of all this, and was actually too busy to use my computer much at all at the time, the virus was steadily working its way through all my stuff, chomping files up (okay, encrypting them, which is virtually the same thing, since they used very strong encryption). It was probably a few days before I actually noticed some filenames had been changed to something unrecognisable, and were accompanied by advice to check with a certain URL. When I went to the webpage it was a ransom demand – pay whatever-amount to get the decryption key and get your files back. Uh-oh … the penny finally dropped.

That wasn’t a good sound. The baleful clink of that penny dropping was the moment the reality of the situation started to set in. I knew then that my files had been locked up tight and there was virtually no chance of getting them back. Ever.

A stroke of luck in a bad situation

I was lucky, as it happened. I know someone who is very good with computers, and he was able to take charge of the situation. He changed the settings on my router so that whoever had sent the virus wouldn’t be able to ‘find’ my system again – by changing the settings it had become effectively invisible to them. Any address they had for me was now history!

Then he downloaded Windows Defender Offline, disconnected from the internet, and set it to do a thorough scan of my computer. At that point it should have been clean. But he knew they could leave some bad stuff in the system that might evade the scan, and that it might just possibly reappear after a set period. So he wasn’t happy to leave the system as it was. He wanted to reformat it for complete peace of mind.

Meantime I found the backup I had made. It was a backup of the system as it was about a year ago, so we both knew that if it was successfully restored I’d still lose everything on my system from the intervening months. Still, better than nothing. He wanted to know if I wanted to go for it, because once you do a complete system backup you lose whatever is currently on your system. Since my system had been compromised it wasn’t a difficult choice. I told him, go for it!

System backup to the rescue!

It wasn’t as straightforward as it should have been (nothing is, after a virus has been busy in your system). Took him a few days actually, but he managed it. And I’ve got my system back as it was a year ago, with no trace of the virus on it (as far as it’s possible to know, and theoretically it shouldn’t be possible for anything to survive what is, in effect, a reformat).

Then I was able to check my external hard drive. I’d taken a quick look early on (only a quick look because by now I’d become aware of the danger of staying connected) and I had seen some damaged files, so I assumed I’d lost everything there as well. As it turned out, that wasn’t the case. It must have been working its way through the drive’s contents, because some files were ruined, but lots were untouched. So I was very lucky in that respect.

Then I had to spend time working through what had survived and what had been encrypted. Between the restored backup and the clean files on the external backup I was able to gather together a sizeable amount of stuff, a hell of a lot more than I thought I’d be able to recover. So, all in all, like I said, I was very lucky. Luckier than I had any right to be, considering how foolish I’d been.

A virus affects everything!

Bit by bit I’m still finding isolated areas of damage though. For example, my address book (connected to my email account) has been decimated. I’m having to harvest the email addresses of individuals and companies from past emails to replace those stripped from the address book. And when I came to use TypeItIn just yesterday, it had disappeared; I hadn’t taken care to back it up somewhere, so all files connected with it were squished 🙁

I’ve downloaded the program and I’m having to repopulate it with bits of text of various kinds, some of which I had kept copies of, stored in an information manager program that survived (and thank God for that!). It will take a while to rebuild what I can of it, but again I was lucky to have anything at all to build on.

Don’t trust to luck; be prepared

So, the moral of this story is this: do not trust to blind luck to save you in a situation like this – it’s just not a good strategy (oh okay, it’s not a strategy at all, if you really want to be picky). There are things you can do to prevent this kind of attack, and there are things you can do to make recovery more likely and more successful. I’ll cover them in another post, soon.

Right now I’ve got to get back to work, reorganising files and protecting them in various ways (it’s an ongoing situation). If I’d organised things better in the first place, needless to say, this wouldn’t have been necessary, but that’s the way it is. I was foolish. Okay, I was more than that, I was really stupid. But at least there’s hope that reading this, and the subsequent post, should put you in a much stronger position to protect your stuff. So maybe some good will come out of it.

Make no mistake, your files are valuable. We sometimes forget just how valuable. They might hold financial details, or personal details, or family photographs, or business details, or just your ideas, plans, thoughts, etc. I say “just”, but it’s all vital information. Whatever they hold, your files are highly valuable, and personal, and the loss of them will be sorely felt. Believe me, you don’t realise just how painful it can be to lose them until it actually happens.