Ransomware has become a gold mine for digital criminals. In the first three months of this year, electronic extortionists squeezed US$209 million from victims desperate to recover their data after it was scrambled by the malicious software, based on FBI estimates. At that rate, ransomware could funnel as much as $1 billion into criminal coffers this year.
Ransomware typically will encrypt most of the files on a computer, but some pernicious programs are selective about what they encrypt on a machine. One such form of ransomware attacks the boot sequence of a computer.
