The most valuable asset associated with your computers,
whether their computers at home or computers at work,
is your data.
That is the most important asset on there.
At home, you probably have family pictures.
There's videos of trips that you've taken.
There's important documents that you've scanned,
and they're all on these storage devices at home.
At work, you probably even have a broader set of data.
There's planning information, employee details,
you've got financial information,
and of course, company proprietary data.
There's a lot of valuable information here,
and there's probably a certain amount of money
that you would be willing to pay if all of this data
disappeared tomorrow and somebody offered
to give it back to you.
This is the business model for ransomware.
It's one where the bad guys want your money and the best way
to get the money from you is to take the data away from you.
Your entire computer becomes unusable
because everything that is important on that computer
suddenly becomes encrypted.
In some cases, ransomware is not even legitimate.
It's simply a fake message that's put on your screen.
They might use the Department of Justice logo
or mention the FBI, and they've told you
that the police have locked your computer.
If this is ransomware that is not real,
then you may be able to take it to a security professional
and have them retrieve the files and remove the fake ransomware
from your computer without damaging or losing any data.
These days, however, there is an entire new generation
of malware called crypto-malware.
This is ransomware that encrypts all of the data
on your computer and holds that data for ransom.
It's going to encrypt all of your data files.
So on your home computer, you probably
have those pictures, and your documents,
and your movies, and your music.
And it encrypts everything except the operating system.
It wants your system to continue working so that it can present
a message to you saying that all of your files
have been encrypted, and this is the process
that you should go through to send the bad guys some bitcoin
so that your computer can then have a decryption key apply
to all of these files and you can regain access to your data.
This has become a very lucrative and very successful
business model for the bad guys.
They know that they're using a payment system that
is untraceable, so you have no idea who
you're sending this money to, or where they happen to be.
And it is using public key cryptography.
So it's using a very strong encryption,
and there's no way to decrypt the data.
You have to get the key from the bad guys or all of this data
will be lost forever.
Or will it, because if you're someone
who is very smart with handling your data, then
you probably have a backup of this data somewhere,
and you'll be able to recover all of those pictures
and all of those videos.
Make sure you have a backup and make sure
that this backup is kept offline.
A lot of the modern crypto-malware
will find your backup systems if they're online
and encrypt the backups as well.
One of the ways this crypto-malware embeds itself
onto your computer is taking advantage
of a known vulnerability.
So make sure that you are always updating your operating system
and all of your applications are updated to the latest versions.
One way to stop this malware from executing on your computer
is to have your anti-virus already recognize the malware,
and for that to occur we have to have the latest signatures
for your anti-virus software.
Make sure that you're constantly updating
these anti-virus signatures and you
may be able to stop the malware right in its tracks.
If you're updating your anti-virus signatures,
you're updating your operating system,
and you're updating your applications,
you've got the best chance at avoiding any type of infection
from this crypto-malware.