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"It systematically hunts down every one of your personal files—documents, databases, spreadsheets, photos, videos and music collections—and encrypts them with military-grade encryption, and only the crooks can open it," said Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at Sophos.

(Read more: What to do when managing someone else's money)

Your computer, even though it's infected, keeps working normally; you just can't access any of your personal files. It's scary, especially if you haven't backed up your data.

"Cybercrime is evolving as the bad guys get smarter and use newer technologies," said Michael Kaiser, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance. "They're always looking for new ways to steal your money."

CryptoLocker is different from other types of "ransomware" that have been around for many years and that freeze your computer and demand payment. Those can usually be removed, restoring your access to files and documents.

But CryptoLocker encrypts your files. There's only one decryption key, and the bad guys have that on their server. Unless you pay the ransom within three days, that key will be destroyed. And as the message from the extortionists says, "After that, nobody and never will be able to restore files. …"

(Read more: New security threat: Cash register skimmers)

The typical extortion payment is $300 or 300 euros paid by Green Dot MoneyPak, or for the more tech-savvy, two bitcoins, currently worth about $400.

To instill a sense of urgency, a digital clock on the screen counts down from 72 hours so you can see how much time is left before that unique decryption key is destroyed.

One victim described his anguish in an online post: "The virus cleverly targeted … all of our family photos, including all photos of my children growing up over the last 8 years. I have a distraught wife who blames me!"

This sophisticated malware is delivered the old-fashioned way: an executable file hidden inside an attachment that looks like an ordinary ZIP file or PDF. One small business reports being compromised after clicking on an email attachment that was designed to look like a shipping invoice from the U.S. Postal Service.

Open that file and bad things start to happen, although it may take several days for the ransom demand to appear on your screen after the machine is infected.

"The author ... is a genius. Evil genius, but genius none the less," an IT professional commented in an online tech forum. Another wrote, "This thing is nasty and has the potential to do enormous amounts of damage worldwide."

(Read more: Scammers target utility customers)

Good anti-virus software can remove CryptoLocker from your computer but cannot undo the damage—the encryption is that good.

"It's the same type of encryption used in the commercial sector that's approved by the federal government," Wisniewski told me. "If the crooks delete that encryption key, your files are gone forever. Even the NSA can't bring them back."

Victims large and small

The cybercrooks are targeting both businesses and individual users—anyone who will pay to regain access to their files.

The CryptoLocker forum on BleepingComputer.com is filled with page after page of horror stories. Here is a small sample:

"When we discovered the infection from a user's workstation on the network, this program had encrypted over 180,000 files through the network shares in a period of 6 days. I pretty much shut down the business for 2 days after we realized what was happening."

"Our company was infected this morning. The virus hit a machine 4 days ago and today we got the pop up about the ransom. All files on the network drive the user had access to are now encrypted."

"We had a workstation get infected yesterday that encrypted everything on our network share drive. We had backups, although they weren't recent enough, so despite all feelings against it, we paid the ransom and everything started to decrypt overnight."

Of course, there's no guarantee of a happy ending even if you pay the ransom. And then there's the bigger issue: By paying, you're helping to fund a criminal operation.

"It encourages them to continue," said Howard Schmidt, former White House cybersecurity advisor and a co-founder of Ridge-Schmidt Cyber. "As people pay the ransom, the bad guys have the money to reinvest."

How to protect yourself

Go on the Internet and there's no way to be sure malware won't make it onto your computer— even if you follow all the rules of safe computing. So you need to act defensively, and that means regular backups.

"Back up, back, up, back up," Schmidt said. "That's the only way to reduce the risk of losing your files forever."

If you have a recent backup, you can recover from CryptoLocker without serious consequences. That backup should be a snapshot of everything on your system rather than a simple synchronization, as happens with most automated external hard drives and many cloud-based services.

With synchronized backups, stored files that have changed on the master drive are overwritten with the new ones. If a malicious program encrypts your master files, those backups would also be encrypted and thus useless. Your backup should be disconnected from your computer until the next time you need to access it.

—By CNBC contributor Herb Weisbaum. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter

@TheConsumerman

When considering buying a new computer for home, or renting laptops  for our next training class at work, I wondered if there was any benefit to a laptop or desktop. It seems like so much of what we hear about today is the latest and greatest in laptops, notebooks, readers…. every thing portable. Some might argue that the desktop is a dying breed.  But yet, there is something that draws us back to the, dare I say it, nostalgic days of having that sturdy fixture placed firmly on the desk.

So how does one make such a costly decision? I want the high-performance and the modern efficiency without sacrificing affordability and convenience. Is that too much to ask? Well, let’s look at some facts. Laptops are portability with identity distinction. However, they are known to have fixed peripherals with limited upgrade options and usually don’t have discrete graphics.

So we rate high on the convenience and chic factor if you choose a highly recognized or most recent name brand. Laptops can upgrade the RAM and hard drive but this is a small consideration since most desktop users don’t upgrade their systems during their lifetimes. If you  are not a gamer or 3D artist the graphics issue is a mute point. Add-on upgrades are available for a pretty penny  and high graphics laptops tend to be large and heavy, thus knocking out the affordability factor if you are set on high graphics for gaming or design.

Continued here. 

Who’s Reading Your Emails?

Today we all use either texting or emails far more than we use letter writing to communicate with our friends and relatives. In business the use of email is ubiquitous, and seems to grow exponentially each year. Sooner or later someone in your company will raise the question regarding the amount of confidential or business sensitive information collectively the organization is sending and possibly receiving by email. Is this information secure and should we just casually be sending it via this medium? Before email we either sent our correspondence by post in an envelope or byway of fax. Both relatively secure. In the case of postal services the interception of letters etc. was and is quite rare any easy to spot. Whilst in the case of fax almost impossible to achieve.

Email on the other hand is much more easily subverted and not so easy to detect if and when it has been. This is when the idea to encrypt your company email will be discussed and considered. You can think of encrypting email as akin to putting your letter in a registered envelope, it can’t be read as it travels to the recipient and only the bona fide recipient will actually receive it. Sounds like a great idea a virtual no brainer! But how do we implement such a system?

Simplicity with Security is the Answer

The first major obstacle to using encryption is how will the intended recipient be able to decrypt the encrypted email? An issue that is by no means a trivial concern and one that can lead to the whole system falling into disuse because it is not easy to administer and for the user not easy to use. Any system that is put in place to increase security, if it relies on the user changing their normal business practices, is doomed to fail. What is needed is a simple but secure solution that everyone can use.

See the full post here entitled: Email Encryption For Both Beginners & Professionals 

1. Reserve your technology as early as possible.

We all know that a big component of stress is last minute planning. So do yourself a favor and don't put off that call to your Tech Travel Agent to get your quote and or reservation started. It's way easier than you think, so just do it! The sooner you book your event rental needs the sooner you can get onto your next project, even if that project is simply to get out of the office and get started on the weekend!

2. If you don't know exactly what type of hardware you need, ask, don't guess.

Not being technically savvy does not need to cause you stress. Simply explain your project to your Tech Travel Agent and let them suggest, or investigate further, to determine the most cost effective rental hardware solution for your event. Communication really does matter, so tell your story and don't hesitate to ask for advice. It's what a Tech Travel Agent does, so let them.

3. Plan to have your order set up and tested at least two days in advance.

No instructor wants to walk into a classroom full of employees and start off the class by asking.. Does everyone have shortcut to our new HR software on their desktop? So whenever the situation permits, have your equipment delivered at least two days in advance to allow your staff, or instructors, time to familiarize themselves with the equipment, to make sure everything is in working order, and make any "last minute" adjustments way in advance of the event start date.

See the full post here.

By: Joseph Muscarella, Network/Telecom Manager, Duralee

Today’s small business is about fighting for every inch of success, and finding ways to use your time and resources wisely. For 60 years Duralee Fabricshas been working hard to grow from a one-room shop to a thriving provider of fabrics and furniture to businesses around the world. As we have grown, so have our IT needs. With all the resources we have invested in, it was important for us to make sure we didn’t lose all the headway we have made in the event of a disaster.

We needed to establish a disaster recovery center that would enable us to quickly recover our servers if something bad happened. And to reduce the chances of that happening, we needed to secure our workstations and servers from a wide variety of threats. We had an antivirus solution in place, but we were having a hard time seeing what was happening with our showrooms, so we didn’t always know whether viruses were being taken care of.

On the disaster recovery side, we opted to use System Recovery from Symantec. This allowed us to image our production servers and use that image to create the virtual servers in the new DR center. We were then able to automatically replicate our data to that site. To deal with outages of individual servers, we also store those images onsite, which lets us perform bare-metal restores more quickly

We looked at several endpoint security solutions. Our showrooms are only connected to our operations through the internet, so we needed something that could operate through the cloud. That led us to Symantec Endpoint Protection.cloud. It was painless to license, and we were up and running quickly.

Continued On SMBNow.com - Symantec Keeping SMBs Secure