Cybercrimes can cause significant financial harm. And just when companies think they've considered all the ways to mitigate cyber exposure, savvy online criminals create new ways to hack into systems.
Recently, cyber criminals have moved beyond stealing employee information or company credit card numbers. Instead, they've turned to a prize that they consider bigger and better: proprietary documents housed on company computers.
CryptoLocker is a sophisticated malware that utilizes public-key encryption, a type of cryptographic system. The way the system functions is that a set of keys is created. One of the keys is public, and one is private. The public key is used to encrypt the information, and then the private key of the same pair, only known to the recipient, is used to decrypt the information. The cryptographic system at its origins is the antithesis of malware; it provides increased security as parties can encrypt and decrypt messages without having to share passwords.
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