Ransomware, what is it?

In today’s world, Cyber-attacks are becoming much more covert and sophisticated in nature.  Gone are the days when an attacker was content with simply deploying a Trojan Horse virus to secretly see what is going on in your computer.  They are now bent on a destruction of the end user’s machine, and even launching Botnet style attacks in order to infect and destroy thousands of other computers in the process.