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There is a particularly devious type of malicious software that locks users out of their own computer systems until an individual agrees to pay a ransom to the hackers. In these cases, the FBI has surprisingly suggested just ponying up the dough.
It's not the type of advice one would typically expected from the FBI, but that's exactly what was recommended by Joseph Bonavolonta, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's CYBER and Counterintelligence Program Boston office.
"The ransomware is that good," said Bonavolonta at the 2015 Cyber Security Summit in Boston, as quoted by Security Ledger. "To be honest, we often advise people just to pay the ransom."
Yeah, it's RT, but I did a search, and that or similar headlines popped up on dozens of news sites. I clicked a couple of them, and the stories match. Try this one,
https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/fbi-ransomware-malware.html
Personally, I can almost certainly afford to nuke and reinstall, unless they get my RAID array. Then - I'd have to think hard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @12:45PM
that's because antivirus is the biggest waste of CPU cycles in software history, it's herd immunity for the common virii that gets sent to mailing lists and the like, if you were to be targeted today by somebody wanting to infect your network, they would and it will get past all software defenses, AV vendors would need to have samples of the executables sent to them to then protect others from the same threat, but by that time its too late.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @03:13PM
I have to agree with this. My company forces one on us, but I can honestly say that it hasn't picked up anything bad in the past 10 years.
Maybe I am just lucky, and I know not to click on those attachments from friends and family that say "look at this!".
At home we use one of the big WebMail services and it is pretty good at finding attachments with malware, so those never get to our PCs.
My kids get malware every so often and they know the standard remediation is wipe and reload...makes them more conscious of what they click on.
I have seen WWW sites that are malicious and don't need clicks to cause problems, but I haven't encountered one....I do keep the browser software uptodate.