HOLLAND, MI (WHTC) – It may be the Christmas/New Year’s season right now, but for cyber criminals, there’s no such thing as a holiday.
A growing online menace is “ransom ware,” where hackers infect a user’s computer and demand money for “releasing” the machine from their clutches. Cyber security expert James Allen of Micro Bytes Unlimited in Holland describes one particularly “scary” scenario when the victim is given two options. “Either you pay one Bitcoin, which doesn’t sound like much until you realize it’s between 700 and 800 dollars right now,” he said in his monthly visit to “WHTC Morning News” last week, “or you send out this infection to two of your friends, you get them infected, and then they pay. If they both pay, then you don’t have to.”
Allen recommends having “disconnected” backups of your data apart from your computer that are less likely to catch online infections.
