Symantec has released its Threats Report for 2013 and one of its main conclusions is that ransomware attacks grew by 500 percent over the previous year, and turned vicious.
The form of ransomware that became most common in 2013 used well established virus-propagation techniques, poisoned downloads, browser exploits, and so on, to infect end user machines with the ransomware. Once it gains control, the malicious code encrypts the contents of any disk drives it finds and demands a ransom payment before the user can access any of their files again. Typically in 2013, the scammers asked for payments in Bitcoin to an anonymous offshore bitcoin bank after which they promised to send you the decryption key used on your computer.
The best known of the ransomware products was dubbed Cryptolocker and used strong encryption methods which are pretty well impossible to decrypt if you don't know the secret key. It first appeared in September and in the next three months is estimated to have infected upwards of 200,000 computers world wide. The ransom fee depended on bitcoin exchange rates but worked out at several hundred pounds. Some estimates said one in a hundred victims pay up. Other surveys reckoned that as many as two in five of infected users in the UK had given in to the demands. The rest, presumably, had to reformat their hard drives and start again.
So how much would you be prepared to pay if your computer turned into a useless brick tomorrow morning? And what can you do to protect yourself against this form of threat? You should, of course, have anti-virus packages, not open files of unknown origin, and so on, but by far the best thing you can do is make sure you have backups of all those files you really can't afford to lose.
Remember, good secure backups kept up to date and kept well away from the PC protect you against all manner of threats, not just ransomware. If ransomware is going to hurt you badly, then you will have even worse problems if your disk drive fails catastrophically or the enthusiastic trainee accidentally formats the disc, if your PC bursts into flames, or your office is burgled and all your equipment stolen. Making regular backups may be tedious but it is still your best line of defence.
24th April 2014
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.