I think ransomware is when your system's hard drive gets encrypted by a malicious program or script and next time upon boot you can't get access to any of your files. Then a window pops up that tells you that the whole computer is locked down and you need to send a predetermined amount of Bitcoins to the hackers' wallet address. Then they will release a decryption key so that you will be able to get back your stuff which is being held for ransom on your own machine thus the name ransomware. Honestly I don't know if any of your stuff is uploaded to the hackers before the encryption commences but it won't be a surprise if it is when they can simply double dip by doing this.

other form of payment  LIKE? Do not name other e-currency....

I heard of this years ago actually but at the time it was targeting the police and business owners. Needless to say they used to pay up to get their files back/unecrypted.

Now they're moving on to average joe, that was always going to happen I guess.

That is not a bad image for BTC it is more a bad image for the guys who are downloading crap on their machines, usually porn lol

It also used to be done with other payment methods like UKASH.

You're "important files now belong to them so hope they're not that important because they will find something to do with it that you can be sure of.

 

  yep

This hasn't happened to myself but a friend of mine and yeah, it does really suck as much as it sounds like.

First of all, thanks to all of your reply.

Fortunately, we have lost only unimportant files thanks to backups, and those unimportant files can be re-made.

We have used Windows 7 on our computer, and have all Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Firefox installed. I use Google Chrome as my main browser but my brother was using Internet Explorer...

I don't know what the ransomware was, my brother said that he have been doing a project, searching for sites and that's probably one of those sites having malicious codes (or hacked). They're all not porn-related.

They have only locked some common file format, like DOCX, PDF, JPG. They don't lock EXE programs, because doing this may locked any bitcoins we have (but we don't have Bitcoin Core). On my computer there's only few altcoins installed, naming Ambercoin, CAPTcoin and Yovicoin.

Yes they want BTC just because of the anonymity feature provided by it. They have stated the they wanted 500 USD, but in bitcoins (according to the price of $420/BTC). The price information of them is outdated because 1 bitcoin worth ~$460 now!

I can't name the ransomware, they say that they've encrypted the files via Internet. I can't upload a file here, as I'm not using my computer now. Also we're going to format all hard disks (thanks to backups) and not keeping all the lost unimportant files.

Finally found a method to decrypt my files and problem solved. No BTC was paid. Case closed