New ransomware has been detected in the wild, with Kaspersky Labs identifying a variant of an older trojan dubbed Gpcode. The variant encrypts many files on the infected computer, ranging from documents to pictures to C source code. After encryption, the program demands extortion money from the owner of the machine in return for a decryption key.
"Ransomware" as it is called isn't particularly new. It has been seen and reported several times before, though it was barely thought of at the time. It is still something you hear of rarely, which is probably a very good thing. Hopefully the culprit of such annoying plots will see prison time rather than extortion money.