A new flavor of Ransomware leads with a ‘friendly’ offer.–PC Pitstop
User Friendly Ransomware
By Stu Sjouwerman, for KnowBe4.com Security Awareness Training
It’s been more than a year since the first vicious ransomware stuck up its ugly head.
Turns out this was a hugely successful criminal business model, and more than 10 competing copycats followed soon. Here is a whitepaper that gives you the short history of ransomware.
Some were more professionally implemented than others, but most of them use strong cryptography to grab data files from drive C and follows up with all mapped drives in alphabetical order. The latest strain has a new trick up its sleeve: it allows victims to decrypt one of the encrypted files for free, and starts out cheaper than the rest. It’s “only” 200 bucks instead of 500.
The critter is called CoinVault (not to be confused with the legitimate online coin exchange service) and even has a snazzy logo. The malware authors tried to make the process as simple as possible for the victim. They must have found out that the average small business does not know what Bitcoins are, and how to get them. They went as far as adding a user-friendly button for copying the bitcoin wallet address and included a 24-hour countdown timer that lets you know how much time you have to pay the ransom until it doubles. Jeez, thanks!
