New Dangers And Bad News

You may already have heard of ransomware, the newest trick of the bad guys to get at your money.

If you have not here is a VERY SHORT explanation: A ransomware virus encrypts all your data files, that is in effect makes them unusable and unreadable. After the encryption is done you have to pay money to the crooks do get instructions and a "decryption key"; if the instructions and the decryption key work correctly as they should you get your data back but sometimes it does not work. Your data is held for ransom, hence the name.

So far the highest amount reportedly paid by a large California based medical organization was 17 million dollars.

Very recently the web sites of a whole lot of well known and big organizations got abused to show advertisements infected with ransomware. Some of the affected web sites were:

• msn.com
• nytimes.com
• aol.com
• nfl.com
• theweathernetwork.com
• thehill.com
• zerohedge.com 

and many more. These sites have millions of daily visitors! If you are interested you can read more details here.

I can not say it often and loud enough:

If you see advertisements on the Internet your web browser and thus your computer are NOT SAFE at all! Fire your current technician and call me or send me an email!

When I leave a customer's house they ALL have a safely set up web browser that should not show ANY of these commercially distributed advertisements.

Stay safe.