Give me $300 and I will give you your data back

Security research firm Prevx has been covering a piece of malware that infects user's computers, steals and encrypts their data, and then holds the data hostage. In a posting on their blog, available here, Prevx goes into detail on how the malware made it into companies and who was impacted. It appears that Booz, Allen, Hamilton, the US DOT, HP and several other well known firms have all fallen victim to this nasty piece of code.

The malware apparently scours the victims computer for sensitive data, encrypts it, and then transports the data to a Russian hosting service run out of Panama. A technical analysis of the malware, known as NTOS.exe, is available here.