A Hotmail user logged into their account this week to find that scammers had deleted all their e-mails except for one, which was from a hacker demanding cash in exchange for restoring the lost information, according to Websense. Websense said this scam is a variant of ransomware, which is a malicious program that encrypts documents on the victim"s computer and asks for a payment in order to decrypt the files. Had this been the owner or an employee of a small business, the company"s intellectual property (IP) would have been at risk.
Joel Camissar, country manager at Websense ANZ, said that the Hotmail account of the victim is thought to have been hacked after they used a spyware-infected computer in a Spanish Internet cafe. The hackers had deleted everything from their inbox, outbox and removed all their contacts.