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By doing so, criminals can potentially access many of the services we use, from our emails to our
bank accounts, going through our online dating life. They can then try to empty our bank accounts
using stolen credentials, or even use those details to purchase items online.

Furthermore, some of our more private information could be used as potential blackmail in order to
extort some money from us.

Some other viruses such as adware are there to try to redirect our web searches onto specific
advertisement pages, with the purpose of getting us to buy specific items, exposing us to many
advert popups. This kind of virus will often insert itself into our user interface; often our web
browsers.

When trying to access a page, we will often be redirected to an advert page, making our online web
navigation very difficult by bombarding us with advertisement.

Other forms of malware include Trojan Horses, a form of harmful code which will hide inside
people’s computers undetected and can be used for a variety of purposes. Once again, Trojan
horses are often used with criminal intent, mainly sabotaging existing system.
The purpose of this can vary from industrial misconduct (crippling the competition) but more often
than not is mainly used by people whose ideologies go against their targeted companies. By
crippling a whole companies’ network infrastructure, they try to stop those companies from
operating.

Some other viruses such as CryptoLocker are programed to simply destroy data, which is what this
article is mainly interested in. The purpose of this sort of virus will be shown in the following
paragraph.

CryptoLocker: the ransomware which can destroy your data

As the title says, CryptoLocker is a form of ransomware. What it does is pretty clever. It invades our
computer and encrypts some of our most used files, making them impossible to access by their
original user.

CryptoLocker will encrypt files which we really need and have spent a lot of time working on, from
our text files to our game saves.

Once we try to open or use those files, they emerge as a different encrypted format, making it
impossible for us to open those files, instead showing us corrupted an unusable files.

Once a user’s computer is a victim of this sort of ransomware, they will be contacted by the
perpetrators with a ransom demand; asking the user to pay for their data to get released back to
them in a usable format.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the blackmailers will actually release the files after they have
been paid, so it is pretty much a lose-lose situation for the user.

42 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – September 2015 Edition
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