Anatomy of a ransomware attack

“Ransomware that phones home to some central server could use symmetric encryption to perform its sordid garbling.”

Unfortunately, if you fall victim to a ransomware attack and don’t have any backups, it’s probably too late to do anything about it. The usual asking price to unlock is around $500, though many variants will threaten to increase this amount after a couple of days, and may even threaten to make decryption impossible after longer. These threats just provoke anxiety in the victim, who’s then more likely to pay up before considering the merits of doing so.

What is important to remember is that while there’s a possibility that whoever’s in control of this malware is reasonable enough to provide a decryption key, there’s also the possibility that they won’t.