Brian Fine one of our in-house support technicians reported today, but this virus seems to have been around since at least Dec 2008. So it isn’t exactly new but its delivery is. It seems to have found the WIN Antivirus (virus) trojan and is now using it to jump onto your machine although we are not positive this is the case. Brian wrote:
Destructive trojan
For the first time today I encountered the FileError_22001 variant of win antivirus.It corrupts and overwrites all Word, Excel and (apparently) PowerPoint documents on the workstation. The solution from microsquish at this point is to restore from a clean backup.
Notice the file message left in your documents
The best I can tell from some Googling is that the "malware" was yet another trojan downloader. Unfortunately, it's beginning to look like the "payload" program corrupts those files by overwriting - the simple solution is to replace corrupted files with ones from your known clean backups.
I know, I know, it's not something you want to hear - but this (corruption) is why you need to implement a backup strategy. Unfortunately there is no way to prevent this kind of intentional corruption any more than there is a way to prevent sudden hard drive failure.
I found a reference on McAfee’s Community Site (not someplace I would normally go) that sounds like it might be a fix for this error. There is a Catch 22 to this in that if you don’t notice that this is the problem… then you will probably want to clean your machine of the virus before knowing that the files themselves have been encrypted. This response on the site sounds good but we don’t have a system to try it out on. RE- FileError_22001. You will have to search the internet for a site that has the decrypt software because it is not where he states that is in the article. If you do a typical fix on the computer though this will not work because you will have gotten rid of the encryption keys during the clean up process.
My parting thought. Don’t ignore the fact that you need to backup your files, at least the ones you can’t afford to lose. If you treat your computer and its data with the thought in mind that you could lose the content of the system at any time, and you are compulsive in protecting your important information with one or more backups, then losing a system and its data is no big deal. It is a time consuming event to reinstall your applications if you have quite a few, but if you are backing up your data effectively then it is an annoyance not a catastrophe.