One fine day, you logged into your Computer as you do it on a daily basis, and you find a message telling “Pay a ransom of $300 within 4 days or else all your data on your hard disk will be erased forever.”
Yeah, this is brutally shocking! You never expect to pay such a huge amount for the data which already belongs to you. Such is the effect of CryptoLocker. It encrypts your private data present on your Computer’s Hard Disk & in return of decryption & the safe retrieval it demands this huge amount of money from you. The lease period being too short, any Tom, Dick & Harry would go mad at it & will agree to do the pay off.

CryptoLocker – The definition:
CryptoLocker is a Trojan Horse- that means it appears in a different form than actually what it is. It normally gets spreaded out via Spam emails that you people keep on receiving through some fraud companies that claim to reward you with some huge bonuses. These spam emails contains some attachments, mostly the .PDF or .DOCX format files. But they aren’t so, they use double extension tricks & get executed on your PCs in a click or two as a .EXE file. CryptoLocker starts searching & encrypting the files present on your local Hard Disks or the shared networks or the Cloud networks.
MAC is more secure in this scenario & isn’t affected by this Ransomware, whereas Windows is widely targeted & brutally affected.

Effects of CryptoLocker:
Well, as already mentioned, the encrypted files ask for some bucks from your pockets to be paid via PayPal, Bitcoin, etc. The payment options made available by this Ransomware are the most toughest ones. They are next to impossilbe to track & leaves you with no other options left but to follow the instructions blindly

Protection Remedies:
“Look before you Leap”. One can always remain safe if he/she thinks, moderates, evaluates before the random clicks which may cause a threat to one’s PC.
Also the regular updations of the anti-virus definitions can do the trick for you

Recent Hack Attacks:
As a report from Bitdefender Labs reveal that more than 12,000 victims have been claimed in less than a full week by this naughty & brutal Ransomware. Almost every alternate day there’s a news coming from around the Globe about the nasty attacks of CryptoLocker. Firstly, it used to charge only 2 Bitcoins, which the users payed off without much of hesitation or thinking over it. But the amount has increased to more than $400 now, this has raised many eyebrows in the Geek World.

I hope this post may have put some light on this sensitive case & the readers of this article don’t end up getting caught by CryptoLocker.

The Article is also posted on hacksurfer.com. Please visit the link for verification. And yeah, the Author remains the same ‘Darshan Gajara‘ 😉