Did someone I know die?

 

 

Today’s email contained a notice from Eubank Funeral Home to let me know of an “unprecedented event” and offer prayers of condolence.   Great.  Prayers are always welcome.  The only problem is that I can’t think of anyone of any import to me that died in the last week.

I wasn’t about to clink on any link, but a quick google search turned up the Eubank Funeral Home.  Apparently the folks at Eubank are aware of the scam going around and have the following posted on their website:

Urgent Warning: A FAKE funeral notice appearing to come from Eubank Funeral Home is circulating. It is NOT from Eubank Funeral Home.  Please DO NOT OPEN the link as it is SPAM and may contain MALWARE. We regret this has happened.PLEASE DO NOT CALL US TO REPORT THIS. Thank you.

Thankfully, it was just a scam.  No one died and I avoided the cryptolocker.

 

Hard Drive Failure!

Nope, not me.  One of our legal assistants told me that her computer was having a problem.  When I walked in, the screen had a notice which said “Hard Drive Failure The system has detected a problem with one or more installed IDE / SATA hard disks. It is recommended that you restart the system.” 

Had she really lost all her data.  Thankfully, no.  We had nothing to fear.  Rather than a bad drive, what she really had was a bad virus.  WindowsFixDisk.  Despite the innocent name, it doesn’t fix anything! 

Thankfully, I have removed this one before on another computer.  About this time you are probably asking yourself what the heck I was doing trying to remove a virus from a computer.  Well, around here we all do whatever we have the ability to complete.  One of my responsibilities around here is making sure the computers and servers stay up to date and running properly.

If you ever get this virus on one of your computers, follow the advice from BleepingComputers.com.  After you are done, run the virus removal tool called combofix.  So far, that has done it for the 2 desktops I repaired.  It takes about 2 hours per desktop to complete, so don’t get started unless you have a little time on your hands.  I sure hope you never have to deal with this stuff, but this will save you a good bit of money over hiring a computer tech to make a service call.