Gadgetory

ordinarily falling victim to a ransom plot means that you are the son or daughter of some rich person and the only way to get out of it is by paying tons of money or waiting for Arnold Schwarzenegger Kurt Russell to come and rescue at least that's what TV would have us believe these days being held for ransom can actually happen quite differently with your computer of all things I'm talking of course about ransomware a particularly diabolical type of malware that is to say bad software that's been making headlines recently so here's how it works once ransomware gets on your computer usually through an infected email attachment or the all-too-common Trojan horse attack it will lock your computer or your data in some way and demand payment in exchange for giving control of your system back to you some of the simpler forms of ransomware will simply try to fool you into thinking there's something wrong with your computer and get you to pay money to fix it a common tactic that we see in those banner ads that tell you that you've been inexplicably infected by something now oftentimes with those you've probably got at least rudimentary control over your system still so the only real issue is that you have to deal with these constant popups until you find a way to get rid of the malware a much more irritating kind of ransomware will lock your computer entirely and keep you from logging into your operating system unless you cough up the money many of these varieties of ransomware will display a threatening message purporting to be from the FBI or some other super hardcore police agency saying that your computer was used for something highly illegal but you can get your computer back and avoid doing hard time just by paying a few hundred dollars sounds absurd right but people have fallen victim to this and even if you recognize the scan immediately those ones can be a real pain to remove worst of all is the ransomware that not only locks your system but also encrypts your files and won't provide you with the keys to decrypt them unless you pay up the most notable of these being cryptolocker although many other erienne's have popped up since that one first made the news back in 2013 some other issues with these unsurprisingly cyber criminals aren't exactly the most trustworthy folks and many people have reported not getting their files back even after paying the ransom and on top of that there are some kinds of ransomware that don't even ask permission they just hit your Bitcoin wallet and take the money without even giving you a chance to say well hold on let me think about whether this data is actually worth paying for so then how can you rescue your computer and protect your cash if you get infected many of the non encrypting types of ransomware can be removed by booting into safe mode and running an up-to-date anti-malware tool or if that fails downloading a bootable removal tool to a flash drive and running that however if you've been hit by an encrypting variety of ransomware you're not going to want to hear this but you're probably out of luck as most of these use a very strong encryption algorithms in fact the FBI is the real one has advised people to just pay these ransoms in the past so if you don't like the idea of your money going to online criminals backup your data somewhere preferably offline and remember please to explain to your grandparents what a banner ad is if they call you in a panic over having 50 viruses on their all-in-one PC speaking of getting educated with a lynda.com membership you can get educated you can watch and learn from top experts who are passionate about teaching they have thousands of video courses that you can either stream on demand at your computer or you can download to your mobile device like your phone or your tablet and watch on the go you can make notes yourself or you can just browse the course transcripts to follow along or search for an answer then you can skip to that point in the 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