A Nurse from Greater Manchester was targeted by a group of hackers with a new breed of malware.
Titled "Ransomware" by security experts, the software, after entering a victim"s PC encrypts the My Documents folder with a 30 character password, and leaves a ransom note detailing how to recover the files, and warning the user not to contact the police.
In this case, Ms Barrow, the user affected, did contact the police, and IT experts managed to recover some of her data. The instructions left by the program had told her to order drugs from an online pharmacy in order to receive the password to access her files.
This particular virus is known as Archiveus. The Greater Manchester Police warn: "Our High Tech Crime Unit is aware of this new type of crime and incidents of this kind could increase in future."
Virus Analysts at Sophos have cracked the trojan and discovered the password needed to unlock the user"s files to be: mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, said. "Now the password has been uncovered, there should be no reason for anyone hit by this ransomware attack to have to make any payments to the criminals behind it."