A new variation of the well-established crytolocker virus is doing the rounds. It is being spread by an attachment in an unsolicited email. The email is very convincing and comes either from companies house or as an invoice for you to pay, the look of the email is spot on and at first glance looks legitimate, in fact without opening the attachment you would be hard pressed to notice any glaring tells that point at it being a virus.
Once opened the word or excel attachment pulls down a macro that infects your machine and renders your files unusable. There is no fix for this and only recovering the files from a recent back up will save your data.
Please be vigilant regarding any emails with attachments, as a best practice Never open Word or Excel files from an email. If in doubt reply to the email requesting a PDF to be sent in its place, if the email is legitimate then a PDF should follow.
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