I read an interesting article this morning about a new scary trend called RansomWare. RansomWare is esentially a virus that infects your system and then encrypts your files. You are then notified of this and asked to pay a sum to the author in order to release the files on your computer.

Kaspersky Labs has warned that if a large enough encryption key is used the data will be uncrackable due to the limits of computing power. I can really see this taking of as cyber crime as an industry is rapidly growing (and why not... there are what 3 cyber cops, few laws, extradition issues, and the legal system does not care if granny can not get her email even though a crime has been commited).

Good computing practices are the only way to minimize these kinds of attacks. Antivirus will be one of the front lines of defense in catching these programs before they encrypt files. As with most viruses the user would have to run the program initially to be infected so educating users would also cut down on this. The other key things that most home users do not do is create backups of their data. I have an outlook reminder to backup my data onto a dvd every two weeks.

Article that spawned this post: http://www.theregister.ca/2006/07/24/ransomware/