As soon as he ran the setup.exe , the fans on his new PC began to scream. The cursor started moving on its own, dancing across the screen like a ghost was at the helm. Files began to disappear, replaced by strange icons with .encrypted extensions.
He didn't pay the ransom. Instead, he spent the next six hours wiping his hard drives and reinstalling Windows from scratch. This time, he didn't go to a torrent site. He went straight to the .
A red window popped up: “All your files belong to us. Pay 0.5 BTC to unlock.”
Alex realized the crushing irony—in his attempt to pirate a program designed to stop viruses, he had manually invited one through the front door. The "Avast" he downloaded was nothing more than a Trojan horse, a digital hollow shell filled with ransomware. The Lesson