New variants are released all day so it’s best to have layers of protection. Once a PC is infected with Cryptolocker, the files are “encrypted” meaning even if the infection is removed the files won’t be of any use. If you use CryptoPrevent you should be fine but you can also enabled Hardened mode on Avast.

For me this is just one of hundreds of good reasons why every user should be using drive imaging software as part of their backup and recovery strategy.

Drive Imaging software makes an exact copy of your hard drive/partitions, this should be run periodically and I would say not less than once a week.

This way if you experience a serious problem and this doesn’t have to mean a virus/malware attack, you restore the last drive image.

I am on the point of uninstalling my current Avast and installing v. 2008. I haven’t been aware of “Hardened Mode”. Where do I find it? Once found I assume that it is just a matter of ticking a box? Is there any downside associated with being hardenend?

From the avastUI > Settings > Antivirus - scroll down to Hardened Mode and enable it - Moderate setting is what many would go for (I did), but it appears to be somewhat more noisy than the Aggressive setting.

See RejZoR’s description on the effects of and use of the avast! Hardened Mode - http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=142172.msg1032485#msg1032485.

Alikhan wrote: Once a PC is infected with Cryptolocker, the files are “decrypted” meaning even if the infection is removed the files won’t be of any use.

That should have said ENcrypted or encoded. The encryption is, for all practical purposes, impossible to decode (except by the crooks who encoded it). So yes, even if the malware is “easily” removable, you are left with scrambled, unusable files.

I continue to use CryptoPrevent on all my systems, as well as MBAM PRO on my primary computer.

Ah, my mistake lol. Never reread it. Anyways, edited it. Thanks.