The most amusing thing about this is that this kind of behaviour has happend before, althought those times it was whole firms being attacked, their files locked and ransomed on a one-by-one basis by individual hackers.

That the tactic has been emplyed in a viral form like this was something I expected to happen after hearing of the first occurances of these kind of attaks, although, as is noted in the first post, the password must be contained within the virus to encrypt it in the first place. If RSA had been employed, the victims would have been not-so-lucky.