Cryptolocker ransomware

This is one to be wary of – I’ve seen a couple over the last few weeks and it’s nasty.

It tends to be contained inside an attachment which looks like it’s a PDF. The sources that I’ve seen are many HMRC, various parcel services etc.

It should be noted that a pdf will travel as an attachment to an email without problems. If the email contains a ‘zipped/compressed’ attachment you should be wary.


This will encrypt your documents (.doc, .xls, .jpg, and .dwg to list but a few) and then throw up a splash screen telling you that you’ve got 100 hours to pay them up to $300 USD or a token used in the encryption of the files will be destroyed. The countdown is real !! Once it reaches zero the token will be deleted and the files cannot be recovered.

The message here really is not to get infected in the first place, and also to ensure that you have a backup which can replace these documents after the machine is cleaned up.