Lucas waited. Ten seconds turned into a minute. The fans in his computer tower began to spin at maximum speed, sounding like a jet engine preparing for takeoff. He pressed the power button, but the machine was unresponsive.
But as the final driver reached one hundred percent, his monitor suddenly went black. Lucas waited
Panicking, he pulled the power cable and plugged it back in. When he booted the system back up, it didn't load Windows. Instead, a crude red skull appeared on his screen, followed by a block of text in broken English. He pressed the power button, but the machine
Ignoring his antivirus software's frantic warnings, Lucas disabled his firewall and extracted the files. He ran the setup and applied the "crack" to bypass the license check. To his relief, the software launched perfectly, boasting a sleek interface unlocked to the Professional tier. When he booted the system back up, it didn't load Windows
All of his files—his client projects, his personal photos, and his financial documents—had been encrypted by ransomware. The "cracked" driver software he had downloaded from the sketchy site was actually a Trojan horse. To get his data back, the hackers demanded a payment of one thousand dollars in Bitcoin.