Skype User? Worm holds PCs to ransom

If your data are really encrypted (as the trojan says), I'm not sure a disk recovery compagny can do anything (affordable) for you...

And if it's not encrypted, then you can recover your data by yourself, by booting from a usb device.

Flo-vn wrote:

... And if it's not encrypted, then you can recover your data by yourself, by booting from a usb device.

You still have to rebuild the hard disk OS. The trick is to switch the computer off as soon as the screen shows.

Always better not to click on strange e-mails and attachments/downloads.

Of course. That's something which should be teach from primary school.

And a simple security measure against this kind of attacks, which would prevent any modification on the user's account (like locking your account), is to set the user account type to "simple user" instead of "administrator", and protect it with a strong enough password.

I'm pretty sure the trojan can't do anything against that, except if it has a keylogger or a brute force password crack inside... (but that's improbable, since there are already largely enough unprotected user accounts to hack. Why would the hacker bother caring about the few protected accounts?)