How hackers can ransom your files for hundreds of dollars

Three years ago, Inna Simone logged onto her computer, expecting to see her standard Microsoft desktop. What she encountered instead was unsettling. “Windows along a narrow bar at the screen’s bottom were minimized; they blinked nonstop and the computer made a low-grade buzzing sound,” Simone tells The Post. “I thought something was very wrong.”

Hoping that it was just a glitch, the 70-year-old Russia-born retiree, who lives near Boston, let the computer be and departed on a planned weekend vacation.But when she returned, “there was a message that my files had been encrypted and that I [would] have to install Tor” — the untraceable browser of choice for dark-web denizens — “if I [wanted] the files back,” Simone says.

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