Cough up

By Anonymous - 19/03/2016 12:30 - United States

Today, my roommate used my PC without asking. Long story short, it's now infected with ransomware. The dissertation I've been working on for months is now encrypted, along with all the backups on my second hard drive. Now I have to pay the hackers $1,500 to get the decryption key. FML
I agree, your life sucks 22 476
You deserved it 2 127

Same thing different taste

Top comments

Have your roommate pay the ransom, that is incredibly stupid. Hopefully you can find a way to track down those assholes.

That really sucks for you, but there is password protection for a reason. To keep unauthorized people especially family and room mates from using your computer without asking.

Comments

It is not encrypted, it is just stuff they say to scare gullible people into paying them. Just load in the safe mode, it is usually enough.

I have not seen a ransomware I did not manage to easily undo. Seriously most are badly written with easy options to prevent it and if I can not figure them out there is always google. The only thing more stupid than your roommate is you if you actually are thinking of paying the people behind it.

1. Lock your computer. 2. In event your backups are inaccessible, you can hire recovery teams to retrieve the backups. 3. Something that important should have a redundant backup(a backup to a backup).

Plot twist: your roommate is the hacker

"malwarebytes" is the ans to your problem and its free believe me or not it removes ransom ware "herdprotect" is also another great free product which will remove the ransomware

Sorry, but YDI for either not password-protecting your computer, or for using a password your roommate could guess.

I had this happen too by my mum whilst I was asleep. My brother managed to wipe the computer of everything that happened after the night before (so when I went to bed) and the hackers couldn't access it. None of my files were affected. Did a modem reset to change the I.P and never had a problem with that since. I hope you didn't pay for it, as you still won't get it back or fixed it somehow :(

Sounds like your roomie did that on purpose?!

i truly, truly, feel for you as someone who constantly has to deal with idiotic family members and others downloading willy nilly whatever they see. save yourself from any panic and put a password on your computer and always lock it down whenever you leave it just to be safe. also disregard all these others who have had no experience with ransomware, all ransomwares 100% of the time give you a proper working decryption key when you pay their fee, otherwise they wouldnt make money! mbam or any antivirus will do you no favors as all they do is remove the virus from the system. do a google search to see if theres any existing decryption method for your specific ransomware (chances are none as most use an rsa encryption method where a public encryption key is used that's only decoded by another specific decryption key which are both completely separate from eachother and would take millions to billions of years for modern computers to crack). but heres the good part! you get to guilt trip your roommate for the rest of his/her life! enjoy your personal slave until you start feeling guilty as well! it also makes you morally correct 100% of the time for whatever happens between you and your roommate. all you have to say is "remember that one time when you installed that ransomware on my computer?". tl;dr, enjoy your personal slave for the months/years to come!