The OSIRIS virus - the nightmare of my life

So I posted this to my work blog, but I want to get the word out to everyone possible about this horrible, nasty computer virus, so if you haven't read it there, check it out here -

Where has Moxie been for the last few weeks?  We are constantly working on putting up photos of our amazing clients and so to go a couple of days without seeing something from us on social media seems strange.  If you have noticed that we haven’t posted anything for nearly a month, below is the reason why.

If you know me at all, you know that the one material possession that I value over anything else in this world are my photographs.  This used to mean my scrapbooks (and yes, it still does) but now, it means more of my electronic media.  Images saved to computer and flash drive and backed up daily – all to prevent a hard drive from melting down and erasing my years both personal family memories as well as business images.  Thinking that I was beating the system, just in case anything were to happen to one form of files crashing by backing things up religiously on multiple levels was one foolish thought and a few days before Christmas my worst dream came true.  Please note that this virus even affected my online storage – which I didn’t have any idea was possible.  So my computer, three hard drives and my online storage (because I was logged in and saved my password, etc.) were all compromised.  It started simply enough in that I received an email to my business account telling me that one of my Fed Ex packages had not been delivered and to see the details of said delivery, I needed to open the attachment so that we could figure things out and move forward.  I typically would not have opened this message, but with the holidays and the fact that I sent a very time sensitive package (think Whitey’s ice cream, delivered overnight on dry ice) to my amazing family in Colorado I immediately thought “Oh no, the ice cream didn’t make it there!”  This didn’t make sense for two reasons.  #1 – the ice cream delivery was two days prior and #2 -my cousin had let me know that they had received the package and were enjoying every bite (insert shameless plug for Whitey’s ice cream here – BEST ice cream on the planet).  But since I was in a busy whirlwind of getting ready for the holidays, trying to wrap up loose ends all while taking care of a sick little boy, my mind wasn’t thinking and I clicked. that. button.  I opened the attachment and apparently at that time, everything was re-coded and not able to be opened.  We immediately took my computer to a local shop that has done wonders for my husband and I in data recovery and they gave us the worst news possible – there was nothing that they could do.

Hearing this news was absolutely Earth shattering.  I had just lost every photo & video of my family taken within the last three years.  All of Jackson’s baby pictures?  Memories of family vacations?  LOST.  All of my business files I’ve created, worked on and so carefully backed up?  Gone.  The photos that I had people sending me emails needing reprints of?  Never to be seen again.   I sat on the floor and cried.  What on Earth could we do next?  Well, apparently this virus is known as ransomware, meaning that whoever sent me that message was asking for money to get my files back.  They were wanting thousands of dollars to be paid in bitcoins (what the heck is that? – encrypted digital currency that is untraceable) and if we refused, we would never see the four terabytes of information that was being held hostage – literally.  After doing our research, it appeared that there was a 50/50 chance that they would take our money and we would never see our information again any way.  How do you justify spending thousands of dollars to take the chance that you may recover nothing only to be paying off the crooks that did this to us?   We had one final option – to contact a company called Monster Cloud.  When my husband reached out to them, they were fairly certain that they could help us, but it wouldn’t be cheap.  Immediately, my thought was – I’ll pay anything! YAY!!! Well, after they accessed our computer to see how much data was lost, we received our quote to the tune of nearly $20,000 and again, I felt like I got sucker punched in the stomach.

So many emotions, thoughts and frustrations were happening at the same time –
My business.  It’s not that I couldn’t start over from scratch, I still had my camera and equipment,  but years of work – templates, shot lists, presets, actions, marketing information, logos – EVERYTHING business related was lost.
What on Earth do we do?   In the end, we paid the money and waited nearly a week for our data to run through the process of being saved. Luckily, my husband had the brilliant idea to reach out to our insurance company to see if our business insurance had a rider attached to it that would cover (at least partially) the recovery of our data.  As luck would have it, they are helping out, which is a huge sigh of relief.  We received my computer back yesterday and it seems that most of my data has been recovered (Hallelujah!) and we can start to breathe a sigh of relief and get back to work.

My message to EVERYONE reading this is to NEVER OPEN AN ATTACHMENT of an email if you are not certain you know who it is from – especially UPS, FedEx and USPS – this is how these people are making this virus a huge success (a huge thumbs down, people).  It makes sense, everyone sends packages and to see that one of yours wasn’t delivered makes your gut reaction to be to see why and what can be done.   DON’T. OPEN. THE. EMAIL.    It can literally destroy everything on your computer (and online storage) in a matter of minutes.
Back up your items and then remove them from your computer so that if you do get infected with a virus, it doesn’t spread through your network like wildfire.

Cheers to 2017 being a bit better luck wise than 2016!