Typical – the first recent virus that does damage to the users local files as opposed to just launching a DOS attack or act as a zombie (which the firewall would have prevented) and this is the one that the user gets infected with, AND with no backup of their data!
The cost to us was a days downtime whilst I had the users pc shipped to the office to work on, 5 hours of my time to hack the box to change the administrator password (as this was set by a previous company and I wasn’t bringing the machine online to change the password over the network!),run the av software check (which took about 3 hours to run), run adaware to remove the spyware (gator) on the machine and check for windows updates (remarkably uptodate!) I also had to run a complete network sweep which REALLY slowed everyone’s machine for about an hour – and all because updates were less than a day old and someone was daft enough to open a weirdly named attachment. In their defence the file did look a .txt file due to large amounts of spaces and changing the icon to look like a .txt file instead of a .exe file
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I got whacked by this virus also.. due to my wonderful SON clicking on an attachment.
It deleted almost ALL of my .xls and .doc FILES.. but then.. I found a freeware data restoration took called PC.Inspector which works very WELL.. but in the restoration, I discovered that the virus had attached itself to one of the .doc format files to impersonate my deleted file.. my VET av s/w detected and deleted it.. so no more damage. But.. letting u know that it can do this chamelion behavior as well.