This blog concerns the topic of what is known as “Ransomware”. It is becoming a ever more prevalent annoyance that has been circulating around the internet. The devilish hackers behind it are attempting to extort money from common people. Like its name implies, "Ransom-ware holds your computer hostage, subsequently demanding payment in order for the person to be able to boot or log into their computer again.", says Eric Rainbolt, 4GoodHosting’s support manager. It goes onto a victim’s computer through unpatched software vulnerabilities to silently install itself, and sometimes through social engineering tactics too. “Cryptolocker” is ransom-ware that can spread quickly through email a affects a person’s file that on drives that are mapped to a hard-drive (of SSD) using the drive letters D: , E, or F:. This can also include USB memory sticks, ext. hard drives, or from a network or cloud folder. Paying the criminals, which we don’t advise, may or may not let you access to your system or your data back, but there have been plenty of cases where the ranson-ware’s decryption key isn’t emailed or when sent doesn’t even work. Tens of thousands of machines have been affected in the past couple of years – after the ransom-ware pirates have sent millions of emails. So what can be done about ransom-ware? read_more Ransom-ware is is not only disruptive and intimidating, your subsequently encrypted files can often be considered damaged and oftentimes beyond repair. But if you have adequately safeguarded your system, then it is becomes nothing more than a nuisance. Here are some methods to negate the threat of ransom-ware. Mirror your drive to a backup drive at least once a month. Having a regularly updated backup is essential. If your computer is infected with ransom-ware it may cause you to lose work-in-progress documents. To avoid this it it better to use an external drive or backup service, particularly one that is not assigned a drive letter or is often not plugged in. Patch or Update your software Malware authors rely on people running outdated software with known vulnerabilities, which they can exploit to silently get onto their system. Updating your software often will...
