Michael Pollitt | freelance technology journalist

My piece today – Timing is key to netting phishing victims – in technology Guardian looks at a real example of phishing.

Today’s story – Ransomware victims wait for the worst – takes a closer look at the consequences of the Monster phishing attack I wrote about in August (Monster hit by ‘worst ever’ trojan).

Update 11 October: Jack Schofield answers a reader’s question : ‘how can we protect ourselves from this attack”? in this week’s Ask Jack

My front page story in technology Guardian today – Monster hit by ‘worst ever’ trojan – shows how 1,000 Monster.com job-seekers fell victim to a ransomware trojan which encrypted their files, demanded money, and silently stole personal information. I wrote the piece before this week’s news of Monster.com itself being compromised through (probably stolen) recruiter logins. My story goes much further by showing what happened to Monster.com users in a well-targeted phishing attack.