The combination of malware with cryptography is what results in ransomware and it’s one dangerous mix that is all over the internet at the moment. It’s not necessary for you to be an organization or an e-commerce business to get attacked by the ransomware families. In fact, right now, every individual out there is at risk of these attacks because it is a fact that we all have personal data and documents saved on our PCs.
The mere idea of getting locked out of your own PC is quite terrifying and on top of everything, the hijackers and attackers who infect the PC’s ask for a ransom too. Long story short, something needs to be done about these ransomware variants as soon as possible or else there will be terror all over the internet.
If you look at the statistics, you will see that this year almost a thousand attacks have been reported and most of these attacks were done on the organizations and online businesses that reside in the US. The point to tell you this is that these ransomware attacks are growing with the passage of time and if you really want to protect yourself, then you first need to learn how these variants work in the first place.
Ransomware Viruses and How Your PC Gets Infected
These attacks are carried out by using different techniques that are called “phishing”. Most of the times, your PC gets infected when you open up a website with a malicious script. But that’s not it, these attacks can take over your system through your emails too and sometimes the pop-up ads are the ones to blame. In a nutshell, you can easily be attacked and the wiser thing to do is to create a backup for all your important files and documents so that even if you get locked out of your system, you still have that data with you.
There are two types of ransomware, first is the one in which all your files and your personal data get encrypted and the attacker demands a ransom to give you the decryption key. The other type is the one in which your data isn’t encrypted, but you just get locked out of your computer and to get access you need to pay a ransom.
Speaking of data encryption, these attackers use different encryption algorithms such as the RSA. These algorithms easily encrypt all of your personal data and that’s where all the problem begins. Honestly, nowadays encrypting and infecting someone’s PC isn’t that tough of a job and anyone with a little technical knowledge can do this so you should actually be careful and you need to do everything you can to protect your data.
Final Verdict
For starters, we always say this that you should have a backup for all the data you think is important to you. At least this way, even if your PC gets attacked, you will be a little stress-free that you still have the data saved somewhere.
