Now there's a program that lets novices hijack other people's computers for ransom

My suggestion would be to backup your data to prevent ransom. This can be done multiple ways. You can back up to a thumb drive. You can backup online to Google's my drive which has 15 GB. For your cell phone, if Iphone, you can use Apple's Icloud. Then the worst case, you can wipe and put a new operating system on your computer.
 
I read there are plenty of underground websites that sell these kinds of tools to hackers. Seems like the hackers are quite away out front of the cybersecurity folks.
 
I was in a Hotel earlier today and suffered a man-in-the-middle attack that was so amateurish it must have come from a script kiddie. I know, use a VPN but the fact remains that before you get connected to the internet you are vulnerable. Whoever engineered the script put some hilarious stuff in the password field even...

I have next to no data on my surfing computer. Google Docs [with two step authentication] is about all I use... trading software is all developed and tested offline to the extent possible. I can make a new Facebook account if necessary...

Basically I've found that trying to be secure is somewhat futile. If you want something not hacked then don't connect it to the internet. If you want to surf the internet assume that there really isn't any real security. If you have to connect some valuable intellectual property or financial password enabled banking app to the internet then dedicate a computer to it and use two step authentication and a whitelisting firewall. If you whitelist by the numerical url's [and sometimes this cannot be successfully done] you can't have a man-in-the-middle attack because you will bypass the DNS.
 
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