Don’t brush this off as a scaremongering fluff piece on a slow news day.
There is nasty stuff out there and you can and will lose all your data if you’re not careful. There is no magic bullet to stop malware. You can’t install an antivirus product or an ad blocker and think you’re OK. You need backups and you need off-site backups. There are fantastic and affordable services like Backblaze and Crashplan that make this trivial for anyone. Having a USB hard drive plugged into your computer is not the same thing as a backup strategy.
If you do not know how to sort this out, we can help you. Calling after the Cryptolocker message has popped up is too late, as all we can advise you to do then is wipe your computer and stop it happening again.
The key here is a system that supports versions of files. A system that automatically backs up your stuff is useless if it’ll happily upload the newly encrypted version of your files and replace the old one. You need a system that will give you a copy of a file from a week ago, not just a copy of that file right now.