Ransomware

11 April 2016

Q. What is ransomware?

A. Ransomware is a nasty piece of code that prevents you from using your PC until you pay money to the hacker. Basically it means that your computer and its files have been compromised. Your files may be encrypted, so that you cannot access them, or they may have been removed, with the threat of releasing them to the internet. It is a catastrophic situation for a general practice.

There is a recent account in the New York Times of a small hospital in Los Angeles that had its patient records encrypted and was forced to pay a ransom of $17,000 to have them released. Go to nytimes.com and search for 'ransomware'. Common types of ransomware were found on more than 850,000 PCs running Microsoft security software between June and November 2015.

Measures to prevent a ransomware attack can be divided into technical and people aspects. On the technical side:

On the people side of malware prevention:

It seems likely that most cases of ransomware are initiated by people visiting a compromised website or clicking on a link in an email. The internet is a scary place. If you do get compromised by ransomware you need to engage the assistance of an information security company and report the breach to the office of the Data Protection Commissioner.