Ransomware has been listed as one of the looming cybersecurity threats of 2017.[1]According to Osterman Research, 50% of 540 surveyed organizations had been through a ransomware nightmare in the past year, and just 4% of respondents from US organizations were very confident about preventing future ransomware attack.[2]Â As per Symantec, after dipping in the first quarter of 2015, overall ransomware infection numbers began to climb in the fourth quarter, spiking in October and November 2015 and again in March 2016.[3]
The danger of ransomware comes from its ability to infect a system, making the system’s data unusable by legitimate users, and then demand the victim to pay ransom in order to regain access. Simple ransomware may only lock the system or stop one or more applications before displaying instructions for paying ransom. Another variant makes the system unbootable by fiddling with the master boot record. However, the most common, advanced ransomware may encrypt all or critical data on the system and ask ransom for the decryption key.