I read an article in the News today that was quite interesting, I thought I would share it here, for those people like me, who aren't exactly completely computer literate.
The News here is calling these people Internet Pirates, however I think that is slightly glorifying them, so I shall refer to them as what they are, and that's online criminals. Police here are investigating a hijacking of home computers. These people then request payment to return valuable files. A woman here logged on to her PC to find that all her files had been deleted and moved to a folder which had a 30-digit password. She also found a file called, "INSTRUCTIONS HOW TO GET YOUR FILES BACK". This file told her she would be emailed the password if she paid for some pharmaceutical drugs from a website.
Apparently criminals have developed a new type of virus, nicknamed "ransom-ware", which basically just blackmails its victims. The story I read about is believed to be the first cse in Britain, though it first surfaced in the US earlier this year. The virus mananged to infect this womans PC after she clicked on a pop-up advert offering to clean bugs from her PC. The computer virus that infected this womans PC - called Archiveus - warns people not to contact the police or search for a password. Internet criminals have attacked businesses before, and demanded payment to stop the attacks, but this new threat targets home users rather than businesses.
The news article also suggested some ways of countering this problem, so I thought I'd post them here, though I think alot of it is common sense;
INSTALL an industry standard anti-virus program.
Usually this can be done free of charge and although security programs do protect computers, nothing is 100 percent fool-proof. Security programs can be bought or downloaded.
KEEP your security packages up to date. New viruses are being created all the time.
INSTALL an industry standard firewall program. A firewall places a virtual barrier between a computer and internet hackers who might try to delete information or steal the identity of users.
NEVER open e-mails attachments or pop-up windows you are not familiar with. Attachments are said to be particularly dangerous.