Ransom ware 

On12^th May 2017, seven o'clock in the morning, Amisha woke up as usual. Quickly getting out of bed, she stretched her arms tight, slugged her head and entered the washroom. Amisha was doing masters in Information Technology. That was her last semester. She was going to present her final project after 8 days. She opened her laptop. There were a few final changes left on the slides of the project presentation. When the laptop was started, she typed the password and waited for the Windows desktop screen.  What the hell?! The laptop screen looked a little different. 

On the red background screen, a large message appears in yellow, "You cannot use any of your documents, photos, videos and databases, because all the files are encrypted. It does not make sense to spend time trying to recover them. You can recover your files using our decryption service only. For this you will have to pay nine hundred dollars within three days in the form of bit coins at the web address given below. If you don't make a payment within three days, it will cost you twelve hundred dollars. And if your payment doesn't arrive in seven days, your files will never be recovered. "

Below the message was the address of a website. It accompanied a link saying How to buy bit coins? Website was opened after clicking that link. There seemed to be an interface for getting bit coin for nine hundred dollars.   It didn't take long for her to realize that Ransom ware had attacked on her laptop. She panicked. Still, she controlled herself and began to think deeply about the situation. She recalled that she had not updated her antivirus in a week in order to complete the project.

She possibly opened some unsecured websites to view and download sample presentations. There was a possibility of Ransom ware attack through these Power point slides. But without thinking too much about what happened, she began to think about how to recover the project and presentation files.

 

She had the entire project code backed up with a pen drive. The project code was also copied on a common home PC that was not connected to the Internet. But project report and presentation slides made in PowerPoint were uploaded to Google Drive last week. After that many changes were made to the report and presentation. It was not possible to use them as they were. She had to do a lot of work to make them up-to-date and she was unwilling to do so. Immediate thought came to her mind that could she arrange to pay nine hundred dollars to the hacker? But she thought that, nine hundred dollars were about sixty three thousand rupees. Why should she pay so much? If people simply pay for it, such malpractices and anti-social principles would be encouraged. She should not even think so. She would complete the project report and presentation slides again within a week and confidently deal with the presentation and viva. Her mind lightened with this thought.

 

As decided, Amisha connected her home PC to the Internet. She worked on the old project report and presentation stored on Google Drive, putting on updated anti-virus, working hard all day. In the meantime she tried to recover her laptop from Cyber ​​Security Expert. But only some files were just recovered.

 

Today, Amisha is a Senior Associate in a renowned IT company. However, every two days, she keeps an eye on the updates of antivirus on her laptop; even auto update is set on.  She opens secured websites only, does not open email from any unknown sources, and keeps backing up the data every three days.

©Kavita Datar