The Circle Sport – Leavine Family Racing (CSLFR) has admitted paying off ransomware runners after one of its main test computers got infected with Truecrypt malware. The laptop was quickly isolated, but left the team's crucial test data locked up two days before a big race.Just knowing that we could lose everything that we have worked so hard to achieve over the years in 48 hours was terrifying, said Dave Winston, NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Crew Chief for CSLFR.The data that they were threatening to take from us was priceless, we couldn't go one day without it greatly impacting the team's future success. This was a completely foreign experience for all of us, and we had no idea what to do. What we did know was that if we didn't get the files back, we would lose years' worth of work, millions of dollars.
After failing to recover its files, the team made the decision – a common enough one – to pay up and get its data back. After sourcing a few hundred bucks in Bitcoins to pay the fee, the encryption key was sent over by the online criminals running the code.

That gave the team the ability to get back into its data, but they were worried about other infections lurking on their systems. A survey with security firm Malwarebytes found more ransomware malware on its computers, and now the team has a cleaner network and the security firm's name emblazoned across its car.Companies of all types and sizes can fall victim at any time. Instances of ransomware infection are growing rapidly, and the first step in fighting a disease is protection, said Marcin Kleczynski, CEO of Malwarebytes. Microsoft's claim that its Edge browser is the thriftiest with power has drawn a sharp response from rival browser biz Opera, who called for open testing to work out which app provides better battery life.Earlier this week, Microsoft released research which, it claims, shows that the Edge browser that comes with Windows 10 uses less power than its rivals – although it didn't include its own legacy Internet Explorer browser in that test. But Opera claims its openly replicable tests tell a different story.Like most other engineering teams, we love it when someone picks a fight. If we get beaten in a test like this, we consider it a bug, said Opera's director of software development, Blazej Kazmierczak.Edge hadn't been included in Opera's earlier testing because it was a Windows 10-only browser, he said, but using the same test methodology as before, the Edge laptop crapped out at three hours 12 minutes compared to Opera, which managed five minutes short of four hours.

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Kazmierczak published the testing metrics used in the tests and launched an implicit challenge for Redmond in return. Microsoft declined to comment to The Reg officially, but Edge program manager Kyle Pflug disputed Opera's findings online.This test turned on an ad blocker, which is off by default. Not loading+rendering the same content in all browsers. Opera is the perennial red-headed stepchild of the browser world – currently hovering at about 2 per cent of the desktop market and 5 per cent of mobile compared to more than a third of the market for Microsoft – but has skin in the game when it comes to power usage.The underdog has made battery use a big selling point of its latest build and, in a cloudy world, many users are starting to wake up to how much power their browser is costing them. Google's market-leading Chrome has been rightly criticized for being overly power and memory-hungry, and since browsers are typically the most used app on a computer, others are using this as a selling point.Chrome has nearly half of the desktop browser market, and the lion's share of the mobile sector via Android. So far there's little sign that the search giant is ready to play the power-saving game.

There'll be champagne corks popping at cloudy comms firm Twilio after shares rose 71 per cent on the first day of trading.The company raised $150m after pricing its IPO at $15, but is currently trading at $25.67 a share, up $10.67 or 71 per cent. No doubt there'll be some profit taking at the end of the day, but it's a strong showing for the first tech IPO of the year, and values the company at around $1.2bn.Twilio has yet to make a profit, but it seems to be getting close, only losing $6.5m against revenues of $59m.The voice, messaging and collaborative working tools company is now looking to augment its VoIP and messaging platform and get into the Internet of Things market. A PR snapshot of Mark Zuckerberg's desk has shown quite how seriously the king of the information sharing economy takes his own privacy.On Tuesday, the Behoodied One shared an at-work picture to celebrate hitting 500 million active monthly users on Instagram. But a closer look by California startup employee Chris Olson shows that his laptop has the webcam blocked and there appears to be tape over the audio jacks of his MacBook.The desk setup matches a Facebook Live video from September last year and the cover-up tape would make sense. FBI director James Comey does the same to his computer and while some honestly admit to not bothering, the amount of malware out there that can take secretive snapshots is huge.

Only the paranoid survive was one of the key mottos of Intel cofounder Andy Grove, and he was only talking about Silicon Valley business practices. When it comes to security, a healthy dose of paranoia isn't an aberration, it's a survival trait – and one that Zuck is lacking in.The picture also appears to show that Zuckerberg is running Thunderbird. It kind of makes sense – when Zuck cut his coding teeth, Mozilla's email client was very popular and nostalgia is a powerful force in software.Facebook has spent around $16m keeping its head honcho secure, according to SEC filings. It's telling that he's still taking such precautions over personal computer use. The fact that a multi-billionaire with a world-class IT team protecting him is taking such basic security measures like this should make IT managers concerned that their users aren't doing the same. Microsoft has published new research in which it claims that its Edge browser, bundled with Windows 10, can outperform the competition when it comes to battery life.The lab rats at Redmond set up four identical charged laptops, each using a different browser to stream an identical video. The Laptop running Google Chrome ran out of juice after just under four hours and 20 minutes, compared with five hours and nine minutes for Mozilla and six hours 18 minutes for Opera – while Edge lasted for seven hours 22 minutes.

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The laptops were then powered up again and put through a series of automated tasks, including opening websites, scrolling through articles, and watching videos, each in a new tab. Again Edge won out, although Chrome did better than you might expect and Firefox proved the worst in tests.For these browsing activities, our tests show Microsoft Edge is a more energy-efficient browser on Windows 10, with up to 36%-53% more battery life to get what you need done – whether you're studying at the library, researching dream vacation destinations, or checking in with your friends on social networks, said Jason Weber, director of the web platform team for Microsoft Edge.Finally, Microsoft used its own user data from Windows 10 users that gets sent back to Redmond's servers for analysis. Here Firefox nearly held its own against Edge, with Chrome a distant third. Microsoft did not supply data for Opera.So why is Microsoft making such a fuss about all this? Well, battery usage by browsers is the next big differentiator for the applications and Redmond wants some skin in the game.Last month, Opera issued the first code for its battery-saving systems in the browser, claiming a 50 per cent power saving over some of the competition.

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