HitmanPro.Kickstart – # 1 create a bootable USB drive

If your computer is locked by ransomware like the GVU / BKA or FBI-Trojan, there´s  a very nice solution to unlock it. The dutch company Surfright created the software HitmanPro, which is able to create a bootable USB-stick, to track down ransomware and unlock affected PC´s. With the botfrei.de-Edition of HitmanPro you can start your computer from a USB flash drive to remove malware that has ransomed (locked) your computer and does not allow you to access it.
To create a HitmanPro.Kickstart USB flash drive you need to have access to a computer allowing you to download and start HitmanPro. It will automatically determine whether you have a 32- or 64-bit version of Windows installed and will install the appropriate version.

 Download HitmanPro for all Windows versions

You will also need a USB flash drive with a capacity of at least 32Mbytes.
Note: the contents of the USB flash drive will be erased during the creation process.

Once you downloaded the program, just execute it. It could be, that you will have to rightklick on it and run the hitmanpro.exe in “admin-mode”.
HitmanPro will start and will immediately search for a new Version on the Surfright servers.
After its update, HitmanPro is ready to check your computer for malware, or create a bootable USB flash drive, to check and clean an infected PC with it.
Just click on the small Ninja icon   and HitmanPro will take you to create the USB Stick.
In 4 easy steps, HitmanPro will build a bootable USB flash drive, the program will find all attached USB Sticks and will ask on which it shall be installed to.
Just go ahead, choose the appropriate USB Drive and HitmanPro will contact the Surfright servers to get the most actual version installed on the drive.
After that, the installation is finished and in the 4th step you can unplug the USB drive and use it to unlock an infected computer.

If you encounter any problems within the creation of an USB flash drive, it might be, that the USB drive is already in use by Windows.
So if you see the error message : “#5, lock” please make sure, that the USB Drive is not accessed by any AntiVirus Software, or that you haven´t opened it in Windows- Explorer. Any error message, you would see in HitmanPro can be investigated by having a look at the Microsoft´s error message codes, the most common should be #2 ( error  file not found ), which would be a hint for a incomplete download of HitmanPro ( just restart the program and try it again ) or #5 ( device is already in use ) which would tell you to close all other programs that can access the USB Flash drive.

Now, your USB-Stick is ready for action and can be used to start an infected PC to get rid of Ransomware.

In the second part of our workshop, we´ll use the HitmanPro.Kickstart USB flash drive to clean a PC from Ransomware.