Mercury Ransomware - How to remove

Mercury is a recently discovered ransomware virus that can cause a lot of problems if it gets inside of your computer. Ransomware is probably one of the nastiest virus that can completely paralyze your computer. It aims to encrypt all your personal files so you could not use it anymore and ask for a ransom after that so they would provide you with a special tool that can reverse encryption process and decrypt those files.

If your computer was infected with Mercury, you are probably wondering whether to pay the ransom or not. Even though it might be tempting because your personal files are probably very valuable to you, we suggest not to do that. Why? Because there are other methods that can help you solve this problem. The virus itself can be removed using anti-malware software and those encrypted files can be restored from a backup or recovered using special tools.

In this article, we will try to help you to remove Mercury infection and retrieve files that have been locked. So if you are dealing with this problem right now, please continue reading the article. Also, if you have questions regarding this topic, feel free to ask them in the comments section below.

Mercury Ransomware Features

You might be wondering why Mercury ransomware is named like this. No, it has nothing to do with the planet or the element mercury. It’s because this ransomware employs .mercury extension to mark locked files. After the encryption, all files that have been locked will be marked with .Mercury extension. So if you had a file named “picture.jpg”, now it will look like “picture.jpg.mercury”. That indicated that you can’t open or use this file in any other way anymore.

This encryption process is invisible to the user – everything is done in the background. So when malware enters your computer, it automatically starts scanning the hard drive for files that can be encrypted. Unfortunately, Mercury is capable of infecting almost all most common file types, so you can lose all of your important data. And there is no way to stop this process unless you have anti-malware application installed on your computer. A program like Restoro features special ability to stop ransomware infections on the go – it monitors all processes on your computer and if something tries to make unauthorized changes to your files, this attempt will be blocked and you will be informed it.

After the encryption, Mercury will create a file called “!!!READ_ME!!!.txt” and place it in every folder that contains encrypted files. It is a ransom note and it goes like this:

!!! ATTENTION, YOUR FILES WERE ENCRYPTED !!!

Please follow few steps below:

1.Send us your ID.
2.We can decrypt 1 file what would you make sure that we have decription tool!
3.Then you’ll get payment instruction and after payment you will get your decryption tool!

Do not try to rename files!!! Only we can decrypt all your data!

Contact us:

[email protected]
[email protected]

Your ID:-

During the encryption, the virus automatically generates a unique ID code that is assigned to every single infected computer. The ID code is used to manage infected systems and ransom payments. So ’cyber behind this virus want you to provide them the ID of your computer and also send them 1 encrypted file to the email [email protected] or [email protected]. They should decrypt the file and send it back to you, just to prove that they have the ability to do that and encourage you to pay the ransom this way. It’s a very primitive ’social and we do not recommend to fall for it.

Paying ransomware is definitely not the best decision – cyber criminals can simply fool you and take the money without actually decrypting your files. Also, if you pay the ransom, this will support cyber criminals so they could continue their work and generate even more viruses, so that’s also not a good thing.

How To Solve Mercury Virus Problem Without Paying The Ransom

To deal with this problem, first of all, you have to remove Mercury ransomware. That is very difficult to do if you don’t have any help from anti-malware software. That’s why we suggest to scan your computer with Spyhunter. Either one of those programs should automatically detect and remove the infection. Also, you can find detailed removal instructions below this article, so feel free to take a look at them as well.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to simply remove Mercury from your system – your files will remain locked after that, because anti-malware software can’t decrypt them. Eventually, you should perform a system restore and restore all your files from a backup. However, you have to have a valid backup in order to be able to do that. If you don’t, the last hope is to us some kind of file recovery tool that you can find online.

Automatic Malware removal tools

How to recover Mercury Ransomware encrypted files and remove the virus

Step 1. Restore system into last known good state using system restore

1. Reboot your computer to Safe Mode with Command Prompt:

for Windows 7 / Vista/ XP

• Start → Shutdown → Restart → OK.
• Press F8 key repeatedly until Advanced Boot Options window appears.
• Choose Safe Mode with Command Prompt.

for Windows 8 / 10

• Press Power at Windows login screen. Then press and hold Shift key and click Restart.
• Choose Troubleshoot → Advanced Options → Startup Settings and click Restart.
• When it loads, select Enable Safe Mode with Command Prompt from the list of Startup Settings.

 

2.Restore System files and settings.

• When Command Prompt mode loads, enter cd restore and press Enter.
• Then enter rstrui.exe and press Enter again.
• Click “Next” in the windows that appeared.
• Select one of the Restore Points that are available before Mercury Ransomware has infiltrated to your system and then click “Next”.
• To start System restore click “Yes”.

 

Step 2. Complete removal of Mercury Ransomware

After restoring your system, it is recommended to scan your computer with an anti-malware program, like Spyhunter and remove all malicious files related to Mercury Ransomware. You can check other tools here.  

Step 3. Restore Mercury Ransomware affected files using Shadow Volume Copies

If you do not use System Restore option on your operating system, there is a chance to use shadow copy snapshots. They store copies of your files that point of time when the system restore snapshot was created. Usually Mercury Ransomware tries to delete all possible Shadow Volume Copies, so this methods may not work on all computers. However, it may fail to do so. Shadow Volume Copies are only available with Windows XP Service Pack 2, Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8. There are two ways to retrieve your files via Shadow Volume Copy. You can do it using native Windows Previous Versions or via Shadow Explorer. a) Native Windows Previous Versions Right-click on an encrypted file and select Properties → Previous versions tab. Now you will see all available copies of that particular file and the time when it was stored in a Shadow Volume Copy. Choose the version of the file you want to retrieve and click Copy if you want to save it to some directory of your own, or Restore if you want to replace existing, encrypted file. If you want to see the content of file first, just click Open.

b) Shadow Explorer It is a program that can be found online for free. You can download either a full or a portable version of Shadow Explorer. Open the program. On the left top corner select the drive where the file you are looking for is a stored. You will see all folders on that drive. To retrieve a whole folder, right-click on it and select “Export”. Then choose where you want it to be stored.

Step 4. Use Data Recovery programs to recover Mercury Ransomware encrypted files

There are several data recovery programs that might recover encrypted files as well. This does not work in all cases but you can try this:

• We suggest using another PC and connect the infected hard drive as slave. It is still possible to do this on infected PC though.
• Download a data recovery program.
• Install and scan for recently deleted files.

Note: In many cases it is impossible to restore data files affected by modern ransomware. Thus I recommend using decent cloud backup software as precaution. We recommend checking out Carbonite, BackBlaze, CrashPlan or Mozy Home.