Paying the ransom

It works like this:

  • you get a warning message about bad things on your system
  • it includes a link to a web site for unlocking your computer
  • you are given a secret unlock procedure (that may do more harm than good)

This scheme, called ransomware is another way to make money from all of us folks who have computers.

We dealt with this in a local bank. The really great lesson here is that the bank had such good offline backups that they were able to completely recover without paying a bit(coin) of ransom.