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Over 9,000 PCs In Australia Infected By TorrentLocker Ransomware
First time accepted submitter River Tam writes Cybercriminals behind the TorrenLocker malware may have earned as much as $585,000 over several months from 39,000 PC infections worldwide, of which over 9,000 were from Australia.
If you're a Windows user in Australia who's had their files encrypted by hackers after visiting a bogus Australia Post website, chances are you were infected by TorrentLocker and may have contributed to the tens of thousands of dollars likely to have come from Australia due to this digital shakedown racket.
This malware relies on weakness in wetware rather than software. No general-purpose operating system can save you from PEBKAC issues, at most partially mitigate them. Unix-style execute bit rather than Windows' extensions reduces the number of vulnerable idiots by like 2-3 orders of magnitude, but you can bet that if the webpage kindly provides instructions, a good number of marks will still manage to get infected.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
As computer files become more valuable to ordinary people (rather than just IT geeks and businesses), backup plans become more important.
Most general users don't do this, but as the data becomes more damaging if it's lost, encrypted or maliciously destroyed, they may need some sort of solution.
Even a pretty sophisticated ransom-ware would have a hard time if you take an occasional backup and check it by restoring/reading the file on another machine.