Security researchers are finding new frightening malware samples daily, and on 10th of December, they stumbled upon a rather intimidating variant. Dubbed as File Spider ransomware, the infection belongs to the group of malware which encodes users’ digital files and demand fees for their decryption. The detected virus was noticed to arrive into operating systems through malicious spam campaigns.

The sent malicious Word documents contained information in the Bosnian language, but that is not the only thing that these files consisted of. Sadly, they had hidden macro codes which were activated as soon as users clicked “Enable Editing” button. After this short decision, PowerShell to download the deceptive payload of File Spider crypto-virus will run. So, with this easy trick, the spotted ransomware is targeting Balkan region and hoping to play out their strategies successfully.

The ransomware appends .spider extension to all encoded data. Therefore, it is not difficult to recognize this infection from the sea of crypto-viruses that we have seen. As soon as the infection is settled, it will show a warning message. For victims’ comfort, it will adapt to the languages, set in the affected computers. The extortionists also control a TOR website, containing their significant symbol: a spider.

While this ransomware infection is wreaking users’ files, you should pay attention to your own cyber security. If you have not become a victim of any crypto-infections, you should consider yourself very lucky. Catching a ransomware virus nowadays is just as easy as catching a cold: all you have to do is visit contagious areas. For instance, you could interact with an infectious pop-up or an email and end up infecting. However, in the case of ransomware, the cure is going to be very pricy and might not even work.

If you want to be properly protected from ransomware infections, we suggest you to backup your digital data in online storages. If you do not pursue this task, you could risk losing all of it to a ransomware virus. File Spider might be the talk of the day, but there are numerous other variants circulating all around you.

You can never known which website is going to get hacked and injected with malicious codes. You can never be sure which online ads might be delivering malicious payloads into your operating system. The only thing you can be sure of is that your files are safely uploaded into a backup storage. With this in mind, you will never have to consider paying ransoms to vicious extortionists.