The world has changed pretty substantially from my teenage days when I'd happily run pirated software. Back in the day viruses and malware would either screw wi

The world has changed pretty substantially from my teenage days when I'd happily run pirated software. Back in the day viruses and malware would either screw with your computer in amusing and reversible ways (so long as you had a good backup), or spam you with popup ads. Maybe they'd relay spam mail for a while until you noticed your internet connection was useless and run a virus scan. The damage malware can do now is so much deeper - encrypting all your files, which then gets synchronised out through the tool you were using for backups automatically, before holding them to ransom. Then it turns your light bulbs into DDoS nodes to spread that to people across the internet, and probably you won't notice because you're on a fast enough connection for that to fly under the radar.