Virus Alert Virus 🔐 (. Paynow Files) — How to Remove?

What is Virus alert virus?

Virus alert adds its own .paynow extension to the title of each encrypted file. For instance, an image named “photo.jpg” will be altered to “photo.jpg.paynow”. In the same manner, the Excel file named “table.xlsx” will be changed to “table.xlsx.paynow”, and so forth.

In each folder that contains the encrypted files, a read_it.txt text document will be found. It is a ransom money memo. Therein you can find information on the ways of paying the ransom and some other remarks. The ransom note most probably contains a description of how to buy the decryption tool from the ransomware developers. That is how they do it.

In the picture below, you can see what a folder with files encrypted by the Virus alert looks like. Each filename has the “.paynow” extension appended to it.

How did my machine catch Virus alert ransomware?

There are currently three most exploited ways for criminals to have ransomware working in your system. These are email spam, Trojan injection and peer-to-peer networks.

If you open your inbox and see emails that look like familiar notifications from utility services companies, delivery agencies like FedEx, Internet providers, and whatnot, but whose “from” field is strange to you, beware of opening those emails. They are very likely to have a harmful file enclosed in them. So it is even riskier to open any attachments that come with letters like these.

Another option for ransom hunters is a Trojan virus model³. A Trojan is a program that gets into your machine disguised as something different. For instance, you download an installer of some program you need or an update for some service. However, what is unpacked turns out to be a harmful program that encodes your data. Since the installation file can have any name and any icon, you have to make sure that you can trust the source of the things you’re downloading. The optimal thing is to trust the software companies’ official websites.

As for the peer-to-peer file transfer protocols like BitTorrent or eMule, the threat is that they are even more trust-based than the rest of the Internet. You can never know what you download until you get it. So you’d better be using trustworthy resources. Also, it is reasonable to scan the directory containing the downloaded objects with the anti-malware utility as soon as the downloading is finished.