Dear All,
Yesterday at 2:38pm an employee in one of the organisation in Ghana was attacked by ransomware by name locky, this ransomware was sent in an email with an attachment , the attachment contained an ms-word document with a malicious macro, the locky program was activated when the user clicked "enable editing " after the document was opened, this macro begun an encryption process using a RSA-2048 and AES-128 algorithm, the encryption process targeted the following file extensions *.docx;*.pdf;*.pptx;*.xlsx;*.doc
Yesterday Three US hospitals were hit by "locky" as well,The IT systems of Kentucky Methodist Hospital and Chino Valley Medical Center and Desert Valley Hospital, California, were infected with this ransomware,
The files cannot be recovered unless the victim has an offline backup to recover from or pays a ransom with bitcoins via the darkweb,the attackers promise to send the private key in a compiled program to decrypt the victim's files after they receive payment.
System restore cannot restore files just settings so it will not help in this case.
Third-party recovery software cannot recover the encrypted files because the files are not considered as deleted. The previous ransomware by name "cryptolocker" did not rename the files it encrypted so it was possible to recover your files by using the windows "previous version" feature, however "locky" renames all the files it encrypts so that windows cannot index the file's shadow copies to recover them.
CERT-GHANA recommends that all users open email attachments with caution especially executable files.
Cheers,