How common is ransomware?

Ransomware is the most sophisticated data-security threat to date

Ransomware is becoming increasingly common because it’s overall effectiveness, this is because victims are readily available to comply in order to regain access to their important data, in 2015 victims lost approx. $325 million by paying ransom. User can be affected with Ransomware from a variety of sources and commonly found on malicious websites. It can piggy back on seemingly trusted software, email attachments and many other sources. Once it is downloaded, it starts to lock file or files that are considered important for the user. Due to the overwhelming success with ransomware, newer and more effective versions are being developed which are impossible to bypass, these are known as crypto-ransomware. The Crypto-Ransomware identifies certain data saved on your PC and locks its, preventing the user from accessing important documents such as spreadsheets (XLS or XLSX), PDF documents (PDF), word files (DOC or DOCX), PowerPoint presentations (PPTX) Publisher, (PUB), One Note (ONE), Visio (VSDX) Microsoft Access (ACCDB) and other important information that maybe considered invaluable for the user.