It’s amusing today, but not tomorrow when these extortionists branch out into apps that masquerade as games or actually useful-sounding utilities. That’s the obvious next step.
I do agree with you on that point. Isn’t that being done already?
Actually, those kinds of ransomware predate this. This is a newer iteration.
About 3 years ago my company got hit by one, because an employee downloaded a program, and it went and encrypted every file on the networked drive. Luckily, if you have backups, you can just restore from those and delete the encrypted files.
Otherwise, there is no way to get the files back without paying the “ransom”. Of course, there is no way to know that if you pay, they will give you the correct key. Most of the time, paying them does seem to work, but I would refuse to do that on principle.
It wasn’t that long ago that it was discovered there were several “flashlight” apps in both the Apple and Google stores that were actually malware. Apple, in turn, made the flashlight a built-in part of the OS. It goes to show that criminals will always find a way.