What to do if your Virtual Desktop got infected or hacked

Just like any other PC, server or smartphone, your virtual desktop may be infected by viruses or hacked if you don’t put in place adequate protections, such as antivirus, firewall, strong passwords, promptly system updates and, last but not least, common sense.

The vast majority of the system violations are due to brute-forcing against weak passwords, in particular, if the virtual desktop has its own public IPv4 address which makes the system reachable from to the whole Internet.

Another reason is the exploitation of an OS bug which hasn’t been patched on time by running the security updates.

All the rest is related to the actions performed by the user on the virtual desktop, such as the execution of malicious programs.

When a virtual desktop gets infected or hacked, it may be used to perform further attacks towards the Internet or our network, for this reason, we may shut it down (and suspend it) in order to stop the propagation of the attack.

How to fix it

Once a system has been compromised, it is better to get rid of it completely rather than rehabilitate it. In fact, you’ll never know how deep is the impairment of your system, although you managed to regain control of your virtual desktop. In short, you cannot trust your system anymore, period.

That said, our advice is to reinstall your system from scratch or restore an earlier backup image, if available, that you believe still intact in terms of safety.

Should you have any valid reason to recover the system, for example, to save your data or because you perfectly know how to deal with it, feel free to try at your own risk.

How to recover your data if you can’t fix it

In case you failed to clean the system, but you need to recover some important data from the virtual desktop, we can offer to attach its virtual drive to a new virtual desktop as a secondary drive, so that you can pick up and transfer the files you need, as long as they are not encrypted or infected.

If you wish to proceed with this solution, please submit a ticket.

The secondary drive will last for 3 days only, then it will be deleted.