A friend of mine called me for advice yesterday. He had just gotten hit hard by ransomware.

If you’ve been keeping up with the news lately, you’ve probably heard about the explosion of the ransomware strain known as Locky. Locky is a very aggressive type of malware that encrypts files on a victim’s computers and crawls through network shares that are accessible to the victim. It is typically delivered by macros inside of Microsoft Word documents sent through email. When recipients open the Word document, they are prompted to enable macros, and when they do, the ransomware embedded in the macro executes and infects the victim’s computer.

This is what happened to my colleague, who works for another company. So far, we’ve escaped Locky at my company, but I’ve had my own experiences with ransomware, and I’d rather be the one giving advice on how to deal with it than the one who has to clean up the mess. And because of my own experience, I was able to give some helpful advice to my friend.

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