Quote:What is ransomware?
Ransomware is a sophisticated piece of malware that blocks the victim’s access to his/her files, and the only way to regain access to the files is to pay a ransom.

Quote:May 12th 2017 saw the biggest ever cyber attack in Internet history (yes, bigger than the Dyn DDoS).  A ransomware named WannaCry stormed through the web, with the damage epicenter being in Europe.

WannaCry leveraged a vulnerability in Windows OS, first discovered by the NSA, and then publicly revealed to the world by the Shadow Brokers.

In the first few hours, 200,000 machines were infected. Big organizations such as Renault or the NHS were struck and crippled by the attack.

But this massive wave wasn’t the only one. A few weeks later, a ransomware strain resembling Petya started spreading around Europe, affecting companies, Ukrainian institutions and banks, and even the even the radiation monitoring system at Chernobyl.

Ransomware has been a growing trend for the past two years, and this is just a culmination, a grand reveal to the wider world of just how big of a threat it is. But we’ve been writing about this for a while now.

Some time ago, a delivery guy walked into our office. While we signed for the package, he realized that we work in cyber security and asked:

My entire music collection from the past 11 years got encrypted by ransomware...