The UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) is urging the public to take advantage of a two-week window to protect themselves against the GoZeuS and CryptoLocker malware, which has been holding people’s personal content to ransom and fraudulently transferring cash from online accounts. The organization said that the alert “is part of one of the largest industry and law enforcement collaborations attempted to date” and that “activity in several countries, led by the FBI in the US, has weakened the global network of infected computers”. What this translates to is more effective malware prevention if action is taken now. The issues potentially affect anyone running any version of the Windows operating system – including running as a virtual machine on a Mac – as well as any server running Windows, or Windows embedded.