CryptoLocker vs Photorec

A very short note about a very hot topic: ransomware viruses spreading across the Internet.

Some day ago a man bring to me a USB disk infected by one of those malicous applications, asking to recover the many family photos collected there (of course, stored in single copy). I had no way to decrypt encoded files, and little experience with that kind of issues (you know: I use Linux...), the only idea I had has been to pass the disk with photorec, popular and powerful recovery application able to scan the underlying filesystem (including NTFS) block by block to re-assemble deleted files.

Probably this is not a definitive solution, and is not enough to entirely recover the lost informations, but I've been able to restore 5000+ JPG files in just three hours of execution: at least it seems to be a reasonable compromise for personal losses.