Three Strikes–You’re Out!
Racing Pulse, a popular horse racing website that is based out of Bangalore, India, was forced offline on January 17, 2017 after suffering its third ransomware attack in a week. The last, and most critical, encrypted their entire site.
Dharma ransomware, the variant that took down Racing Pulse, encrypted all of the website’s data. The exact ransom demand was not disclosed by the hackers in the initial ransom note. Instead, they said the amount required to decrypt the site would depend on how quickly the site officials reached out to the hackers for the decryption keys. In a sign if “good faith” the hackers offered to decrypt three files for free. These files could contain anything of value, and could not be any larger than 10 MB.
Site officials reported to Hack Read, the server that was encrypted was located in the United States. To mitigate the risk of future attacks, the site plans to relocate another server. It was anticipated the site would be running by January 22, 2017; however, as of today, it remains unavailable.
To see a full list of ransomware attacks that have taken place so far in 2017, you can click here.
