Have you ever noticed that your entire music collection which you cherished for the past decade got encrypted by ransomware, immediately you click on a link in a spam mail or when you try activating macros in a malicious document? Have you also been told to pay a sum of $500 or more to get the decryption code? If yes, you are also among the 200,000 victims across 150 countries. Businesses, organizations and individuals are still trying to handle this rising terrifying virus, this has left millions of people worried if they are at risk of this ransomware. However, many still have questions such as what is ransomware? What effects does it have? How can one get this ransomware? And many more. Questions such as these will be answered here and solutions to curb this will also be offered.

If you were not living under a rock for past sometime, you must have heard about the leaked NSA tools and the vulnerabilities getting exploited into the wild by WannaCry Ransomeware. This would be one of the most disastrous cyber-attack, once infected the ransomware encrypts user-files and asks for payment in Bitcoin to release decryption keys needed to unlock the files. As of today 298,455 machines are traced to be infected by this malware in over 150+ countries world-over. The first-line of defence to make sure your computer is not infected is to install latest Microsoft Updates and follow the advisory provided here, if you are late and infected WanaKiwi may be of help.

You don't need to be a techie to keep your computer safe from threats and protect your personal information. Many of the ways to protect your computer are simple things that you can do without having to invest in any extra security programs.

The following are a few simple ways to protect your computer that anyone can implement.

After providing the free Kingsoft PC Doctor utility, the company has now launched a new PC cloud security utility Kingsoft Antivirus 2012.

Kingsoft Antivirus 2012 is a completely free antivirus solution for detecting and cleaning trojan viruses, and protect your computer with system defense K+ and boundary defense. It can be a standalone product, and can also work along with other security software.

There is no doubt that cyber spying is the most preferred new age intelligence gathering tactic used by almost all countries, but countries like USA and China have already been exposed for using technology as a weapon.

The conclusive proof's fingering all leads to an Isarel, American joint-venture targeting Iranian nuclear facilities using the world's most advanced computer malware Stuxnet are now well known publicly. To make things even more interesting researchers at Kaspersky Labs have now unveiled another extraordinary peace of cyber-weapon, named "Flame" the data-mining malware has already caused substantial damage and massive amounts of data loss as admitted by Iranian officials. Iranian authorities are also claiming that the virus damaged centrifuges operating at its uranium enrichment facility at Nantaz and gathered data of its oil fields by breaching into computers of high-ranking officials.

Due to the complex and very sophisticated technology (20 MB in total) used by this malware it has been labelled "the most sophisticated cyber weapon yet unleashed". The ‘Flame’ cyber espionage worm is highly modular in nature and is specifically targeted at middle-east countries, the sophisticated attack toolkit with similarities to Stuxnet and Duqu malware's is basically a combination of computer backdoor, Trojan, and a worm. The success of this weapon can be gauged from the fact that it is believed to be spying since past 5 years undetected. The sophistication can be measured by the fact that "Flame" has 80 known Command-N-Control servers dedicated to itself and the modular nature of the malware allows its controllers to load/unload code of there choice anytime.

Multi-engine anti-virus scanners are a great help when dealing with suspicious files as you are able to leverage the malware detection capabilities of multiple antivirus engines with most up-to-date definitions from a single interface. VirusTotal has been one of the most well-known such free service offering scanning of suspicious files and URLs with 42 anti-virus engines helping users reveal viruses, worms, trojans and other kinds of malicious content.

One of the most needed feature to make efficient use of multi-av scanning services is an browser helper utility which would enable users to scan URL's and files right from their web-browsers before visiting the suspicious link, thankfully VirusTotal team has realized this and a Firefox web-browser addon VTZilla is now available enabling users to right-click any suspicious link and launch a VirusTotal URL Scan and even pre-scan a file before downloading from the default "Firefox Download Save" dialog-box.