New ransomware that knows where you live!

A new email phishing campaign has started sending thousands of ominous-looking emails that contain the recipient’s home address.

The well-worded email appears to come from legitimate email addresses, and raises very few irregularities. The email comes with a demand for money for an arbitrary service, along with a web link that purports to be an “overdue invoice.”

Click the link and open the file (which looks like a Word document), and you’ll become the latest victim of ransomware — that is, malware that encrypts your files and locks you out of your computer until you pay a ransom and the longer you wait, the larger the ransom you have to pay.

It appears that the scammers are leveraging some sort of database that has home addresses publicly available and using this for the scam.

Restoring from a backup is the only option available if you get infected by this type of virus, so make sure you have current and valid backups. If you need any help with backups or virus removal, please get in touch.