Almost half of the Romanians whose computers were infected by Virus ransomware paid money to the hackers to be able to access the data again, the percentage being surprisingly high for such a poor country.
The information comes from a study commissioned by the Bitdefender, the largest Romanian company specialized in the development of antivirus software, and it reveals just how naive Romanians are when it comes to viruses.
A ransomware type virus is intended to block a computer, access to the Internet or access to certain data with a message telling the user that he must pay a sum of money to a certain person in order to regain access to data.
Most known antivirus solutions protect computers from this type of virus, but 48% of Romanians who were infected paid money to recover their data, their computers remaining infected without installing an antivirus.
48% of Romanian victims of the class of ransomware viruses paid to recover their personal data from the terminal blocked by the most prolific threat of the moment. Ransomware cyber threats, which target both individual consumers and businesses, claimed 20 times more victims worldwide in the past year compared to the previous year by locking devices and demanding rewards.
The average amount that a Romanian would be willing to pay to recover data from their computer is 550 lei, and this is because they open files fromdownloaded from dubious sources, access pages with infected content or open emails with malware attached.
The advice of any skilled person is to be careful what you download from the Internet, to update your antivirus in time, to refuse to pay money to hackers and to ask for the help of a specialized person to solve the problem.
