8chan ransomware virus - How to remove

8chan is a new ransomware that was just discovered recently. Ransomware is one of the most lethal viruses out there – it can strike you out of nowhere and cause enormous damage to your system. Basically, what it will do is lock your files and then ask for a ransom in order to unlock them. It can also infiltrate other infections into your system and cause other unpleasant symptoms.

Everyone can identify the case of 8chan virus infection because the message will be visible right on the desktop. Also, you won’t be able to open any of your personal files. If you were unlucky enough and got infected with this infection, please continue reading the article and learn about possible solutions to this problem. We will help you to remove the virus itself and give the best shot at restoring the files without actually paying the ransom.

Features of 8chan virus

8chan infection is rather a typical ransomware virus. Everything from its’ distribution to the consequences can be found in other similar ransomware viruses, such as GandCrab 3 virus or RandomLocker.

It is distributed as an attachment to spam emails. Cyber criminals behind this infection just buys some databases of a lot of emails and then sends millions of spam emails. Obviously, most of them end up simply unopened and even unnoticed, but some users go to the spam section and read emails there. It is enough to open an attachment to the spam email and that’s it – all files of the virus are automatically uploaded to your computer and infections process starts automatically.

This process is also rather ordinary – 8chan scans your computer for files that can be encrypted (and it can encrypt almost all personal files) and then starts encrypting them by applying a strong cryptography. After this process is over, an unique extension is added to every encrypted file.

Usually ransomware infections appends some particular and static extension to all of the files, but in this case, 8chan virus features a wide variety of various extensions, so we can’t specify just one of them. Regardless of what extension is added, your files will be no longer available to use in any way.

As the result of successful encryption, 8chan will create a file named HOW TO RECOVER ENCRYPTED [email protected] or HOW TO RECOVER ENCRYPTED [email protected] and place it on your desktop.

Those files contain a ransom message that provides you with information about your situation and instructions that should be followed in order to decrypt your files. Here’s original text of the message:

[email protected]
======================
Your files are encrypted!
Your personal identifier: –
=======================
To decrypt files, please contact us by email:
[email protected]
=======================
reserved:
[email protected]

As you can see, it is not known how much you will be asked to pay, but usually ransomware infections like this demands something between several hundreds and several thousands of dollars to be paid in Bitcoins or other cryptocurrency (because it is more complicated to track).

Even though your files are very important to you and you need them urgently, we do not recommend to pay the ransom (even if it is relatively small). You can not be sure that your files be decrypted even if you do pay the ransom, because you can never trust cyber criminals. Also, by doing so, you would support them and that’s not a good thing to do.

Instead of that, you should take care of security of your computer, remove the virus itself and then try other, alternative methods to unlock your files.

First of all, get yourself a decent anti-malware application, such as Spyhunter. Scan your computer with it and all files of 8chan ransomware should be detected and removed. Unfortunately, it won’t decrypt your files. What’s even more sad, there are no free (nor paid) decryptors that could unlock files encrypted by 8chan virus, so the only way to do that is to restore them from a backup.

If you have a backup file that was created before the date of infection and it was stored on an external drive or cloud, you can follow this guide and perform system restore. This will turn your computer back in time and put everything back to normal.

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