-: Ransomware, if you've watched the news
or you scrolled Facebook or you read the newspaper
in the last year or two,
you probably already know what ransomware is.
Ransomware is a type of malware
that restricts access to a victim's computer
or their files until a ransom is received.
That's right, someone is going to go break into your computer,
encrypt your files or change your password
or do something else to hold your system
until you pay up.
You may reboot your computer one day
and you see something like this.
Your computer has been locked.
You have to pay a fine of $200
and be able to pay it through Bitcoin
using this link if you want to get access back.
If you pay me, then I'll give you the secret unlock code
and then you can put that in the little white box
and hit okay.
Now this is essentially blackmail and extortion.
And often times, even if you pay up,
they won't give you access back to the key.
In the best case, they do.
In the worst case, they've now taken your money
and you've got nothing to show for it.
In fact, experts now say, that it's better
not to pay the ransom, because most of the time,
you're not going to get the unlock code back anyway.
Ransomware can be very painful.
Especially if you have all your files
and you don't have any back-ups of those.
This is why, it's very important
that you keep good back-ups of all of your systems
and all of your files, so if you do become the victim
of ransomware, you can simply roll back to an earlier time
and restore from back-up.
Now let's look at an example from 2018.
Back in 2018, the City of Atlanta
got infected with the SamSam ransomware.
This started spreading across lots of their systems
throughout the city, this ended up costing the city
$17 million to fix.
They decided they weren't going to pay the ransom
but instead they had to spend six million dollars
in services and contracts and software upgrades
and another $11 million dollars in hardware upgrades.
To be able to deal with this ransomware attack
that was caused by SamSam.
This makes this the costliest cyber-attack
affecting a government in 2018.
This was despite them not paying the ransom
that was being demanded by the attackers.
There are other examples out there too.
Where hospital systems and patient records
were being encrypted and held hostage.
Or your personal family photos were encrypted in hostage.
In any case, ransomware is going through
and using some vulnerability in a piece of software
to gain access to your machine
and then encrypting your files
and once they do that, you have no way to decrypt them
unless you pay the ransom
or you restore from a known good back-up.