Ransomware

As you may know, there are many different categories of computer infections such as viruses, malware, and trojans.  There is a relatively new group called ransomware that is particularly dangerous.  Current ransomware infections are going by names such as crytplocker, cryptowall and petya.

Ransomware uses very high quality encryption to make your files useless.  The creators are basically using the good crypto standards that are used to secure the internet and using them on your files.  Their goal is to get you to pay a ransom to get the key to decrypt your files.  They are using various methods for collecting payment but a very common one is called bitcoin because of it's anonymity.  The problem is that even if you jump through their hoops, you are not guaranteed the ability to decrypt the files (and it can be pricey)!

These infections are being performed through multiple sources.  Having an operating system that is not patched is one (make sure you are running windows updates!).  Outdated web browsers and plug-ins is another vector (things like old flash player, quicktime, java, etc).  It is not just the old method where you click a link in an e-mail that causes problems (although that certainly still occurs). Sometimes an ad network will receive a malicious ad that then gets placed randomly on websites that are using that ad network (this is often how high profile sites end up being a place you can get infected from).

The best defensive on these is to have backups!  If you are not performing any sort of backups at this point, you need to start NOW!  Even something as simple as getting a USB drive and copying your data to it and storing it disconnected from your computer is a great first step.  Obviously more than 1 backup is ideal, and automatic backups are important as well (although you have to make sure that they don't get encrypted too!).  I will try to cover some back up solutions in the near future.

As always, this is not very detailed on specifics and is meant to be a broad overview of the topic.  The main lesson is to make sure you have your software updates and that you are performing backups.