The Unsettling Rise of Crypto-Ransomware - BuzzFeed

BuzzFeed, by Joseph Bernstein

Earlier this month, a half dozen Maine police departments found themselves at the center of a very unusual hostage situation. To begin with, they had no idea where the kidnappers were hiding. Also, they had absolutely no negotiating leverage. And if they wanted to plumb their files to research the case, they were out of luck — their computers were locked, unusable.

They were being held for ransom.

The Maine computers had been infected with crypto-ransomware, a family of malware that slithers onto a hard drive, encrypts it, and then demands a time-sensitive monetary payment, usually in bitcoin, to decrypt the data. Failure to pay by the deadline results in either permanent destruction of data — whether that’s police records or that screenplay you’ve been working on for years — or a raised ransom. Read more.