All,

I have one Windows 7 machine (not connected to any production environment in our office and even running on a separate Internet connection to be on the super safe side) for visiting "Warez" websites. I am using this Windows 7 machine to scan the Internet for illegal copies of our SetupBuilder product. I've been doing this for ten years, so I know what I am doing. The machine is Symantec Endpoint protected and the virus definition always up-to-date.

Last Friday evening, I powered the *Warez* machine off and went home. This morning I came in the office to find that computer... running. Hmmm, what happened? On Saturday afternoon, it automatically powered on and the CryptoWall Trojan horse (an adsense ad infected the machine) encrypted files using the military grade encryption RSA-2048. You must have the private key in order to get your .doc, .txt, .xls, .bmp, .png, .jpg, .pdf, image and video files decrypted and the software will hold your files hostage until a ransom in Bitcoin is paid. It will also attack every mapped network drive, external drive, or USB flash drive until its mission is complete.

Be warned, this improved CryptoWall variant is very dangerous !!! Backup your machines, protect your hard work. Tell your customers about it.

If you are interested, this is my *PRODUCTION* environment for maximum safety and damage prevention:

My main development machine is a Dell Precision M6600 Mobile Workstation with 32 GB RAM. Internal Samsung SSD 850 1 TB and SanDisk SSD Extreme Pro 960 GB. Then an external Samsung SSD 850 1 TB, a Transcend SSD370 512 GB and a SanDisk Extreme Pro 128 GB flash drive USB 3.0 for fast backups. On top of this, we have several traditional spinning 2.5-Inch hard drives (HDD) for regular backup rotation stored in three different locations. About 30 TB of storage space.

The Dell M6600 is powered by Windows 10 Enterprise x64. This machine is rock solid, military grade, with excellent performance. But I'll replace it with a Dell Precision 7710 64 GB RAM later this year. Only one (1) program is running on the M6600 host: VMWare Workstation 12.

I have three Virtual Machines (VMs) for software development and 20 VMs for software testing purposes. My development VMs (protected by ESET NOD32) have three virtual disk drives. Virtual drive "C" is always the Windows Operating System and Program Files drive (with no "data" files on it). Virtual drives "E" and "F" are my data file drives.

My second (backup) development machine is an Apple MacBook Pro Retina with 2,6 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 3,8 GHz), 16 GB RAM, and 4-channel PCIe 1TB SSD delivering SSD 1 GB/s write and 888 MB/s read speeds. It is running VMWare Fusion 8.

The cool thing is, I can copy the VMWare virtual drives from my Dell to the MacBook and vice-versa. This is excellent.

I am always prepared for the worst case scenario <g> Good luck and happy computing!

Friedrich

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Friedrich Linder
Lindersoft | SetupBuilder | www.lindersoft.com
954.252.3910 (within US) | +1.954.252.3910 (outside US)

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