Do you wonder what makes these guys who attack us every day tick?
the McAfee
Article on the “growth” industry
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2911167/security0/cyber-extortion-a-growth-industry.html
Personally I have bumped into a few instances of this phenomena(extortion and cryptolocker):
As well as phone extortion artists
After infecting the computer they have you call them and then will try and extort money because they will conveniently “fix your computer”.
All of these people want to make money, they are criminals preying on gullible, low information computer users.
“Anti-Hacker Plus” fake app
they set up fake apps on Android app store and sometimes even the apple store.
The Network World article is bringing up the unfortunate effect of having to pay extortionists or you may not get your data back.
The problem is if everyone had a backup of their data (which is what you are supposed to do) then none of us would ever have to pay the ransomware criminals or other types of malware criminals.
As I have discussed in past. we have to get our cyber defenses in shape, we have to get better, build better products. deploy them, configure them and monitor our cyber world.
But most of all, we absolutely cannot take chances, so like the Moon NASA venture beat the Soviet space race, we have to test our cyber defense.
Visit us on Twitter #testforsecurity
That is what we need 3 words: Test For Security -testing your environment is what wil keep your IT department going or your outsourced IT department, your cloud provider, your ISP. Everyone should be doublechecked… the stakes are higher than they were, since we will need the Internet even more in the future.
The alternatives are not going to be pretty:
