Ransomware is in the news a lot but most people don’t realize what it all means. For a long time, businesses and government have used file encryption to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access. A brief description of file encryption is a program scrambles the contents of a file using a “key” which is a small piece of data like a code word or number as a pattern for scrambling the data. This is done in a way that makes it virtually impossible to return that document to a usable state without using that same key to decrypt it. This is very useful in transmitting data across the internet where cyber-criminals can eavesdrop on data transmitted this way and your sensitive data is no longer secret. With encrypted data, the key is pre-shared separately from transmission of the data so the person with whom the key was shared will be able to easily decrypt and use the information sent to them as an encrypted file over the internet. This doesn’t stop cyber-criminals from being able to capture that information, but since they don’t have the key, there’s absolutely nothing they can do with it. It’s a very effective way of keeping confidential information secure on an internet that really not secure.