By passing of as, say, your bank or a shipping company, and tricking you into clicking a link or attachment, the ransomware has infected your computer.

Often, cyber-criminals forge email header information, making the email look legitimate. The malware is distributed via spam emails which contain infected attachments or links. Unfortunately, the perpetrator behind the CryptoLocker ransomware hasn’t been so careless. Fortunately, the malware was poorly made, scrambling the data in the same way on every machine it affected free data recovery tools to quickly remove the malware was soon released. 90 days after infection, the data on the infected machine’s hard drive would be scrambled, and a ransom of $378 demanded, to be sent to an address in Panama. Malware that encrypts your data and then demands a ransom to decrypt it isn’t a new thing by any means one of the earliest examples of malware written with the sole aim of making money was the AIDS Information Trojan of 1989. Unfortunately, data recovery can be next to impossible without the key. CryptoLocker is a file-encrypting ransomware, and when it infects your machine, it encrypts the contents of the hard drive using RSA-2048 key, before demanding payment to decrypt the data.

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