Help50 is an extortion-type virus that blackmails the victimized users after rendering their personal data unreadable. The cyber crooks make a serious usage of this predetermined info encrypting tool, implementing Logical OR operation. The range of files it affects is quite large: 54 sorts that comprise: documents, media, pictures and others. It got into focus recently, spring 2021.
Once Help50 ransomware accomplishes its mission by restricting the access to important documents, a .text file is dropped on the affected computer. Although the issued item is marked as “decrypt_file”, it only provides instructions for further action, but no actual key can be found within it. The ultimate goal of this infection is receiving a payment. So, in the above-mentioned text file a certain email address will be indicated. The computer owner is expected to contact the virus developers, via that contact detail, for indications on the recovery process and crooks’ revenue of course.
At this point should be mentioned that the corrupted files are altered forever. Thus, there is no use in paying the cyber aggressors: unfortunately, they are in permanent disposal.
The best thing to do is preventing the crypto-malware infiltration: it comes as a Trojan bundled with some other applications downloaded from phishing sites. So, it’s getting in your machine due to lack of attention and, of course, luck:
- you may receive an email with attachments: doc, pdf or image.
- it may pretend to be a normal app you were actually looking for;
- it can be a drive-by tool downloaded by the users themselves.
This virus is removable, but sometimes it may successfully attempt to block the anti-virus system in work. If it happens there are solutions described in special guidelines. In any case, backing up is good advice to take. It’s recommendable to store the archived data on a detached device, apart from the computer.
