Most of the Cryptolockers are caused by our own mistakes and it is easy to fall victim for the phishing email that they receive from the hacker.

Here’s an example of how an email distinguishes itself as a genuine package delivery but has the file that corrupts and locks your files:

If you are careless, it merely takes a minute to lock all your files and you’ve to pay the ransom which gives its name the RansomWare to unlock all your files.

If I pay the ransom, would they return my files? Well, not necessarily no! In many cases, the hacker will take your money and would leave you clueless. It is tough to recall a person with success getting their files back from these hackers and they automatically chain up emails to your contacts on Outlook and this is how it spreads. These files hijack your Outlook contacts and your email contacts.

To avoid all the chaos, just simply see who the email has been sent from and do a little reverse look up. In other words, the above email claims that it is from FedEx but if you look closely, the sender of the email is iceweb.net and this doesn’t look like FedEx. This is your first alert. Second, if you have not ordered any package, you shouldn’t be receiving one. This reminds me of the famous 419 scams that are being sent from mostly Nigeria claiming that you’ve won lottery when you did not buy one.

Ransomwares are inevitable. We all have received them via email, most of these are filtered by your email provider such as Google, Yahoo and AOL but a few pass by their security gates and will reach you. With proper caution you can easily bypass their cynical intentions.

I am affected by a ransomware/crpytolocker, what should I do? The answer is pretty much nothing, however it is not the end of the world. Most of the cryptolockers haven’t been decrypted but a handful of them has been. You can visit nomoreransom.org to check if you’ve a decrypter available for your situation. There are handful of them which you can use to solve the issue. You can simply lookup the name of your ransomware on Google and find it on the internet with some basic Google searches and forum results.