11 ms·
You’re infected—if you want to see your data again, pay us $300 in Bitcoins
- Fuzzwah 13y agoVictims don't even get the enjoyment of having to make their payments in some far flung corner of an MMO, like the plot of Reamde. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10552338-reamde https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10552338-reamde
- Uhhrrr 13y agoThat's the first thing I thought of, too. This is just about exactly the model of the Reamde crew.
- warfangle 13y agoda G shou
- officemonkey 13y agoWhich means the Islamic terrorists coincidentally live upstairs (which I believe is one of the stupidest coincidences of any book I have read and enjoyed.)
- eli 13y agoThe story was no doubt based on earlier real-life examples of "Ransomware" like this one: http://www.infoworld.com/t/malware/ransomware-returns-if-you-ever-want-see-your-data-again-449 http://www.infoworld.com/t/malware/ransomware-returns-if-you...
- daveid 13y agoThe article didn't mention, what systems does this ransomware primarily target? Is it cross-platform?
- nvk 13y agoThat i know, only MS
- jerf 13y agoBut note that's only due to popularity. Socially engineering your way into a user running an executable means that executable will simply run with user privs. No trickery or hacking required, no OS holes. And that will mean that the executable will have full access to do everything a user could do, which will effectively certainly include sending a new encryption key over the network, and encrypting every file that user can get a hold of. (One of the little problems with the UNIX-style user permissions is that it is designed to defend the OS, not the user. Sure, that little executable may not be able to corrupt "the system", which may amount to 5 or 10 GBs of easily-replaced code, but it will have its way with the 2TB of the single user's media files.) The only faint defense Linux/UNIX can claim is the slightly higher probability that you'll be on a checkpointing file system and can roll back, and I say only "slightly" because they still aren't very popular yet compared to conventional file systems.
- millstone 13y agoOS X defaults to only running applications that have been signed with a valid developer ID. It’s not difficult to get such an ID, but Apple can also blacklist them, which would prevent the malware from running once Apple notices it. So I think the Mac has a good defense against this kind of attack.
- mkup 13y agoMalware developer can make 256 valid developer IDs, compute 256 signatures and switch them automatically and randomly during the propagation of malware. Once Apple blacklists one developer ID, another one pops out, and so malware continues to propagate.
- egypturnash 13y ago
- mariuolo 13y agoI'm sorry, but if a firm doesn't compartimentalise access and a single infected workstation can bring down everything, then they deserve what they get. Hadn't been ransomware it could have very well been a disgruntled employee, to the same effect.
- sillysaurus2 13y agoI want to upvote you for truth, but HN currently has a meanness problem of which this comment is a specimen.
- GhotiFish 13y agoIt's not truth, it hits residential users all the same. As much as we nerds might wish it, you don't deserve to be extorted because you don't understand computers.
- pavel_lishin 13y agoWhile you're technically right - we are responsible for our security, and we should lock down our networks just like we lock our front doors - this is basically blaming the victim.
- mariuolo 13y agoIn a nice neighbourhood one could probably leave the door unlocked, but unfortunately internet is more like Gangland than Wonderland. This said, I'm not blaming home users, but IT folks who failed to secure corporate data and should have known better.
- emillerm 13y agoI think the article mentions that it's small businesses that are at risk. Most mom and pop shops don't have the greatest IT infrastructure.
- abstractConcept 13y agoWhat sort of IT infrastructure do they usually have? - My gut reaction was that they wouldn't have a need for a server in the first place, but I guess that depends on how small it is. A simple file-share though, would be rather vulnerable to this.
- amalag 13y agoA company I work with was hit when the employee opened a phishing email supposedly from another employee in the same company. It hit about 50 gb of data on the shared drive. We had Crashplan and restored from a few days previous. I then turned on DKIM and enabled quarantining non DKIM emails via DMARC.
- sillysaurus2 13y agoI then turned on DKIM and enabled quarantining non DKIM emails via DMARC. Translation for techies who aren't familiar with email's many acronyms?
- swombat 13y agoAll those acronyms are easily googleable. Not being a techie does not mean you get to be lazy about looking things up.
- sillysaurus2 13y agoI use HN only via my phone to avoid procrastinating, and only when I'm away from my main computer. It's quite effective, actually. Also, experts often have insights that introductory articles lack. Better to ask the source if they don't mind composing.
- sejje 13y agoFWIW he said he is a techie. I often prefer a succinct summary from an expert to, say, a wikipedia entry.
- DanBC 13y agoThe ten thousand readers of HN who don't know these acronyms can use a search engine to look them up, or someone can ask a question and someone else can answer it and save 9,998 other readers the bother. 1 Google search = 1/35 of a boiled kettle. So asking the question just saved about 285 boiled kettles of carbon footprint. (http://green.tmcnet.com/topics/green/articles/216400-google-defends-its-carbon-footprint.htm http://green.tmcnet.com/topics/green/articles/216400-google-...)
- nvk 13y agoStop using Windows, is a good start.
- GhotiFish 13y agoI primary use linux, but even I feel threatened by this. This is Sony's rootkit all over again. edit: never mind, I thought this was novel. Never heard of ransomware before.
- PilateDeGuerre 13y agoThis scenario - minus the Bitcoins - was a plot device in Neal Stephenson's "Reamde".
- coryfklein 13y agoAh, I guess it is time to send the annual email to mom, dad, and the in-laws to be very wary of downloading anything or clicking on links in suspicious emails. I find this is good insurance against the inevitable phone calls I receive as the only computer-literate member of the family: "Hey Cory, all my documents disappeared and I can't get them back. Do I have a virus?"
- susi22 13y agoIn a corporate environment I'd expect crucial data to be on the network drive and snapshotted every few hours. We run ZFS on our network and all the secretaries have to do their doc/excel work on the drive. Nowadays that everybody has a Gigabit Ethernet connection read/writes are extremely quick. Use ZFS and make read only snapshots that are only accessible to the sysadmins. You'll solve many problems that way. We do snapshots at 6am,noon and 6pm and then keep the 6pm one for 7, 14 and 30 days.
- ballard 13y agoYup. That's been the standard practice for the past 10 years, to avoid having to request media from an offsite vendor. Used to use VSS on SANs. (Tested backups are the first three rules of IT.)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- masklinn 13y ago> Use ZFS and make read only snapshots IIRC ZFS snapshots are read-only by definition. Clones are the writable ones.
- mrb 13y agoAgreed. At a previous job, I set up a multi-terabyte SMB/NFS file server (Solaris, ZFS) with snapshots taken every 5 minutes. This was incredibly useful. The snapshots (in .zfs directories) were even accessible to end-users so that they could recover from their own mistakes without the help of sysadmins. With such a setup, the only situation in which sysadmins are required are when end-users accidentally copy sensitive data to the file server, remove it, and need sysadmins to also remove the snapshots to permanently remove the sensitive data.
- vertis 13y agoThis is a great solution if you have a good technical staff helping to run a business. The reality is though that this is more likely to affect businesses without technical knowledge, or home users.
- 13y ago
- gwern 13y agoThe only new thing about this ransomware is that the payment method is through Bitcoin, right?
- smtddr 13y agoyup. But the fact they're using bitcoin shows a clever way for ransomware to collect payment with virtually zero-risk; since it's not possible(that I know of) to really trace exactly who, in real life, got those bitcoins. Which means, ransomware might make a strong comeback since the risk is now basically zero, this program isn't that difficult to write and there's real money to be made. Even if you only charged 50 USD, this idea would make hundreds, if not thousands, a month. Change the binary every once in awhile so its signature doesn't match popular anti-virus databases and you got free money coming in for... well ...forever[1] 1. Educating users to stop running random programs in zip files attached to emails, is apparently impossible. Maybe email-clients should scan the contents of any zipfile it receives and if it finds any kind of executable, put up all kinds of warning dialogs saying "You really don't want to run this. There's no reason to get a program in zipped email attachment nowadays. Please go consult your IT-admin or somebody who knows about computers for a 2nd-opinion"
- donpdonp 13y agothe bitcoin pseudo-anonymity is a plus, but i feel the real value in this new round of ransomware is that the unlocking actually works. Its possible for the ransomware app to verify payment and unlock itself, with no contact or control from the ransomware author, greatly reducing the author's risk. Actually, its easier for the victim too - rather than wiring funds to some bank account in far off lands, a quick anonymous digital payment instead. Im speculating but its possible for the app to query blockchain.info for a deposit for a given address, or (less likely) for the app to download the blockchain itself, and then unlock after a certain balance. If there is high confidence that the data will actually get unlocked, that swings the balance of fight the app or pay the app towards the pay the app side. The author sits back and waits for those wallets to fill up.
- 13y ago
- nsxwolf 13y agoGet a Mac.
- bickfordb 13y agoRunning Windows just became a lot more expensive
- tbarbugli 13y agoAnd than the police shut down the ransomware servers and dooms data from many infected victims to garbage, brilliant!
- tempestn 13y agoUnfortunate for those folks, but if it can prevent many more people from being infected, then still worthwhile.
- pavel_lishin 13y agoWould it actually help? Does the ransomware contact the servers prior to encrypting everything?
- bri3d 13y agoThis variant seems to - it needs the command and control servers to get the public key. Particularly evil malware could probably encrypt the data irreversibly if the command and control servers were unavailable, since as long as the decryption works some portion of the time lots of people will pay, but thankfully this particular example doesn't seem to be there yet.
- tempestn 13y agoEven if it encrypts regardless, preventing the perpetrators from profiting will remove their incentive to keep spreading this stuff. Once antivirus catches up to the copies in the wild, the problem would be solved. Of course, whether it's actually possible to shut down enough servers to prevent them from profiting is another question. But it seems to me anything that makes it more difficult is a good thing, even though it does suck for those who lose data.
- elliottcarlson 13y agoThis wouldn't really prevent them from profiting - an unsuspecting user could still pay the ransom, and then never receive a decryption key, so would be both out of the money and lose their data.
- blhack 13y agoYou can work to prevent this by creating a group policy that disallows %AppData%\*.exe and %AppData%\*\*.exe A good discussion of this happened here: http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1mizfx/proper_care_feeding_of_your_cryptolocker/ http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1mizfx/proper_care... sidenote: this virus actually scares me, and it sounds like it actually scares most people who work in IT. This is the shittiest thing anybody has ever seen, it sounds like.
- mcphilip 13y agoIt actually made my skin crawl reading about it. Never had that reaction to such a story before. Interesting... Edit: It's the BTC aspect that's worrisome. Ransomeware is nothing new -- AIDS Information Trojan did it in 1989, but the (potentially) safe method of payments in crypto currency seem to be a new factor that will attract much more innovation in these type of attacks.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- marcosdumay 13y agoI just though the exact opposite. When I read "Ransomware comes of age with ... anonymous payments." I just thought "Somebody is going for a surprise once he finds out how anonymous Bitcoin really is". Anyway, what really makes me nervous is Microsoft's insistence of executing any data that a their programs touch.
- dutchbrit 13y agoOur company was hit by this yesterday, caused a lot of issues. Thank god we had backups, but they were 2 days old (frustratingly enough, the backup failed the previous day - first time in months...)
- phogster 13y agoNever heard of ransomware before, but the trend is alarming: http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=ransomware#q=ransomware&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=ransomware#q=ransomwa...
- mcphilip 13y agoWhile I'd like to think I'm sophisticated enough about security to avoid this, it makes me concerned about the vast majority of people (e.g. my parents, my girlfriend) that are clueless about such dangers. Are there any recommendations of a simple way to at least enable automated backups of local documents to the cloud on a windows box?
- mistercow 13y agoI think that you could use Box for this pretty effectively. With their $15/month business plan, you get 1TB of storage and can apparently set any directory as a "workspace", which presumably includes the home directory. For most users, that would be more sufficient to keep everything backed up and the syncing process is supposed to be the same kind of transparent deal as Dropbox (which would also be a good solution, except that you can't set an arbitrary directory as your Dropbox folder).
- synthos 13y agountil it encrypts the workspace and that gets synced. Although, I suppose you might have a previous revision as I know dropbox supports versioning for some (all?) kinds of files.
- mistercow 13y agoYeah, I'm pretty sure you'd have previous versions to work with. It would be important to check though.
- thenomad 13y agoNot technically a true backup system, I think, but Dropbox is pretty easy to use and is a lot better than nothing.
- misterbwong 13y agoLook into one of the many cloud based backup providers. I don't have any specific recommendations but here's a list off the top of my head: 1. http://www.carbonite.com/ http://www.carbonite.com/ 2. http://www.crashplan.com/ http://www.crashplan.com/ 3. http://www.backblaze.com/ http://www.backblaze.com/
- ryan-c 13y agoI've gotten a few copies of this, all to an email address that was only ever given out to AT&T, and is not guessable.
- antihero 13y agoI think the interesting thing here is the shift from the target - the "best" target used to be compromising the OS, so OS's made moves to protect themselves from programs running as unprivileged users. Now, it's trivial to wipe an OS and restore from a backup. The real value is the things people store on a computer, which are usually going to be accessible via a user account. One trivial solution would be OS level automatic versioning of files (ala Dropbox or Sparkleshare) - the original files would be written to location that is read only to the user and only accessible via the OS, hence, backups could always be restored from it, but never destroyed without admin rights. Of course, with people having great internet and whatnot, an automatic cloud based solution would be much more likely and useful. I think with Windows 8.1 and onwards, Microsoft are automatically doing this by setting up the "Documents" type folders in SkyDrive - a great think moving forward. Backups are, obviously, a much better solution but require extra storage and usually cost money. So there might be a niche for a freeware product that runs as an admin that automatically versions files - perhaps even as simple as having an admin-owned .git repo for the Documents folder. The worrying thing about this attack is that targeting user data is trivial on all OSs, because of the way we think about privileges - it could be done to us Linux users through something nasty in our shell rc using GPG or whatever. There is no need to compromise anything.
- masklinn 13y ago> Backups are, obviously, a much better solution but require extra storage and usually cost money. And the virus will encrypt anything writable, so the backup needs to be "pull", if the infected machine is the one doing backups and has write access to a non-cold-storage backup location it will may encrypt the backup itself.
- rgbrenner 13y agoSolved this problem at my startup Nuevo Cloud.. the filesystem is copy-on-write, including deletions.. In the settings you can control how long to keep the copy-on-write log, and then you can jump to any second within the log. So even if this virus encrypted your backup on Nuevo Cloud, you can just pull up the snapshot from a second before the infection, and restore your files.
- sergiotapia 13y agoWho are the creators? Are the FBI going to take them to federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison?
- zalzane 13y agoIt looks like the patent trolls have finally found their true calling.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoCentral to the plot in the book Reamde but these guys don't offer a 'pay in WoW gold' choice. Given the cost of computers these days, at least in business a separate 'browsing' machine and 'business' machine seems to be the best solution. I wonder if you could provide wireless for employees to bring their own laptops which had no 'office' connectivity (but internet connectivity) and machines that were hard wired and MAC filtered to the 'business' network.
- scotty79 13y agoI wonder if amount of $300 was determined via A/B testing as optimal for bringing maximum profit.
- c23gooey 13y agoThe article mentions that there is a $100 variant floating around. Makes me wonder whether they use the $100 variant in markets that $300 would be too much to pay. If, is as reported, this virus is pulling in around ~$5million / annum, then that is a great basis for setting up a professional organisation to run the virus and extract maximum value from it.
- Pxtl 13y agoWell that's moderately horrifying. I've dealt with ransomware before, but mostly it just used scary messages, not literally encrypting all your data.
- mrtksn 13y agobut this one seems to do what it claims to do. it's pretty scary for people who don't have decent backup system. but these same people live with the risk of losing their data due to a drive failure, so...
- Pxtl 13y agoA lot of "decent backup systems" would be vulnerable to this too. Say you back up all your local stuff to a RAID that you've mapped as a drive, as well as a mapped Google Drive? It's still all toast. That level of backup would handle any kind of physical failure - a dead drive, the destruction of your house, the failure of Google... but still, this thing would kill it. There's only so much you can expect from a person when it comes to keeping their personal documents and family photos. I mean obviously, if you're running a company you need a real backup solution, but for family files or a one-man-show business? There is no reasonable precaution.
- XorNot 13y agoFirstly RAID is not a backup. This type of thing only works because the backup user has identical permissions to the backup contents as the user being backed up (because they're the same). It wouldn't work on any system where the backup user is a separate, privileged process that is the only one with write access to the stores of backed up files. ZFS with a snapshot script is a good way to implement this for a networked drive on Samba, since it's implicit, automatic, and the point at which it hits would be really really obvious since your snapshot sizes would suddenly explode. The same story is true of volume shadow copy (but MS idiotically limits the user's ability to set a known and trustworthy shadow copy schedule).
- jasonlfunk 13y ago"you need to pay 300 USD / 300 EUR / similar amount in another currency" How about 300 VND? Seems similar to me. :)
- alec 13y agoSince the Bitcoin blockchain is public, couldn't you follow the money? Make a list of all wallets that accepted these funds initially, and then do graph analysis, either to see where the money went or provide others with a tool to avoid transactions with those wallets?
- Phlarp 13y agoTheoretically yes, but in practice mixing services make this much much more complex.
- sltkr 13y agoYes, but this is somewhat like saying you could mark the banknotes used to pay off a person that's blackmailing you. If you catch someone with a marked note that doesn't prove they are the perpetrator; it just means that they received your money somehow.
- Karunamon 13y agoProblem is that doesn't really help you identify the perpetrators. Both mixing services, and the fact that a user can generate unlimited wallets (if someone sends money to a wallet, you can't prove they own the second wallet or if they transferred money to someone else) makes this very difficult.
- gngeal 13y agoThis is what Venti (of the Plan 9 fame) is for!
- bfell 13y agoThis happened to someone I know (really, it wasn't me). Not only did it encrypt the local drives it also hit all of their network drives. As reprehensible as it is to pay the ransom they really had no choice since the encryption happened the prior night before the last backup.
- haberman 13y agoYou could imagine the Bitcoin community deciding to blacklist any wallets to which funds like this were demanded and disbursed. That seems like a great idea until you then realize that this would be a way of denying anyone access to their own funds, by specifying their wallet as the recipient even though the attacker doesn't control it. There really doesn't seem to be any good countermeasure to this.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> You could imagine the Bitcoin community deciding to blacklist any wallets to which funds like this were demanded and disbursed. I can imagine lots of things, but I don't see any reason to believe that that's likely.
- kodr 13y agoand then the thief stops sending the key to unlock the data. seriously the only to stop this is to: - not get infected by opening random exe - arrest the thief
- FootballMuse 13y agoWhat's to say that the bitcoin address remains the same? It can be randomly generated for each infection and as such a blacklist would be impossible.
- egypturnash 13y agoThat sentence works until you start thinking about the likelihood of herding those cats into any action as a community.
- marcosdumay 13y agoOr the police could just investigate the wallet, because it there is a feature that Bitcoin does not have, it's anonymity.
- kbart 13y agoWhich police? The guys behind this virus may as well be somewhere deep in China or Russia, good luck reaching them. It's not a terrorism or child pornography to get serious international attention.
- roasty 13y agoDisabling or limiting your use of JavaScript and Java in the browser will go a long way towards protecting against delivery of this as it is likely delivered by an exploit kit. If you do hit an exploit kit, Microsoft EMET (free) will probably mitigate the exploit/s.
- AsakiIssa 13y agoI know a customer that got hit by this Tuesday morning. Unsurprisingly, Avast did nothing. I just told her the bad news and clean-installed Windows. I have tried to find the private key with sample files, using known file byte headers, the public key and brute force on the private key. Sadly, no luck yet.
- duskwuff 13y agoThat's assuming the private key is even reused. If they're generating a new key for each user (which they very well could be), you're boned.
- ggchappell 13y agoI get annoyed when people are warned not to open some attachment. The real problem here is that in 2013 we're still using the flawed language of "opening attachments" -- as if running a native executable with full permissions is an action that belongs in the same category as viewing an image, reading a text file, or listening to music. Well, it doesn't. This is a problem that should have been solved at the level of OS permissions/UI long ago. Why does a modern OS include UI functionality allowing a standard user to run an uninstalled executable in a non-sandboxed environment? There's no good reason for it. In some cases the problem been solved (e.g., restrictions that allow only signed apps to be executed). But I guess none of those cases include Windows, its standard UI, and popular e-mail programs. :-(
- kuschku 13y agoThe best solution would be the one used by Linux: Separate Data and Software. On Linux there is a specific flag that has to be set and is not set per default to make a file executable. So if you run something, you know that you are running it as a program and not opening it as data. Windows on the other hand marks everything as executable which begins with MZ and whichs filename ends in .exe or .com
- timv 13y agoExcept in this case (original article) it was an executable inside a zip file. In the normal case, unzipping a file on linux will result in the executable bit being restored if it was included on the original file. This is normally what you want - imagine an app that was distributed (over https) as a zip file where you then had to go and manually add the executable bit to each relevant file. But a zip file that was opened as an email attachment is largely indistinguishable from one that was opened from an HTTPS download (it need not be that way, but it is), so the OS has no reliable way to allow you to run executables you download in a zip, but not ones you received as an email in a zip file. There are certainly ways around it, but the executable bit isn't really the solution here.
- olliesaunders 13y agoThe absence of that executable flag does nothing to protect you from using an existing executable and some data such as an interpreter and source code.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pkinnaird 13y agoCalled it in July. Read more... http://blog.kinnaird.us/the-coming-age-of-ransomware-cloud-services-meet-bitcoin/ http://blog.kinnaird.us/the-coming-age-of-ransomware-cloud-s...
- revelation 13y agoThis is why a RAID setup is not a backup.
- abstractConcept 13y agoHas anyone attempted to run this using Wine? As long as you keep all drives (/ or ~/) unmounted, I assume it would be `safe' to test it. Might be a simpler environment to analyze CryptoLocker in, as apposed to a full Windows install.
- marcosdumay 13y agoI'd try it in a virtual machine just in case.
- jpalioto 13y agoNasty stuff. Fortunately for me, this would set off the "why the heck are my fans running so loud right now" alarm that I have in my head (that honestly, I wish I could turn off sometimes ... curse you trustedinstaller.exe!!).
- wentkenko 13y agoPeople on here are talking about attachments and being smart enough not to fall for sham downloads, but this isn't how most of ransomeware is spread to its victims. They use exploit packs and 0 days. Visiting a website that's been hijacked with an Iframe or a proxy that embeds an Iframe or any other data to the HTML that is returned could get you infected. There is no full proof way around this unfortunately.
- fekberg 13y agoI've been trying to raise awareness in my social medias, since my family, friends and co-workers might not spend time on HackerNews. If you want, copy my message and share with your family, friends and co-workers: "Hi folks, There's a new virus out there that I want to raise awareness of, it's called CryptoLocker. Basically what this virus does is that it tracks all your files - hard drives, flash drives, usb sticks, network drives/shares - then it encrypts the files it finds. The only way to unlock the files again is to pay $300 to get the key used for the encryption. The encryption used is RSA with a 2048 bit key which makes it extremely hard to crack, I'd say impossible with the time span and todays computers. You have 72 hours before they trash the key making it impossible for you to get your data back. This can be extremely devastating if you are running a business and all your files are gone. If you sync your files to the cloud, you're still not safe, it syncs the encrypted files as well. If you are able to restore to previous versions of your files in the cloud - great. Let your friends, family and co-workers know about this. Here are some simple ways to avoid getting a virus in general: 1. Don't open e-mails from people you don't know 2. Don't open attachments in e-mails unless you were waiting for the attachment 3. Don't go to websites/click links that you don't fully trust 4. Don't download and execute files that you don't fully trust It might seem obvious to the most of us to don't do the above, but to a lot of friends, family and co-workers it might not be. Imagine waking up and having to pay $300 to get your data back. However, the police tracked down one of the servers that serves the keys and shut them down which means the keys were not delivered and the data was lost, this means even if you do pay the $300, there is no guarantee that you will get the data back. Raise awareness of this and avoid having your files lost."
- jonhohle 13y ago5. Consider alternatives to Windows so you won't have to deal with these silly things that have largely only been affecting Windows users for the last decade+.
- fekberg 13y agoSure, I'll ask my 70+ year old relatives that have been using PC with Windows since they first got their computer to download an Ubuntu ISO, burn that and re-install their system. Joking aside. I'd love for everyone to just jump on a virus free OS, but as soon as that OS is mainstream there will be viruses. The problem isn't the OS, the problem is that people trust everything that is for instance sent to them via e-mail. Users need to be educated on security, no matter the OS.
- coin 13y ago"When the receiver clicked on it, he saw a white box flash briefly on his screen but didn't notice anything else out of the ordinary" What email client automatically unzips AND executes any containing .exe files?
- doubt_me 13y agoHow long will it take until the FBI gets rid of these guys?
- foundlogin 13y agoFinally viruses are doing what they're supposed to - wreck your computer instead of staying under the radar as long as possible. If people are motivated to protect themselves from this they'll also be preventing botnets and doing good to the rest of the internet.
- readme 13y agoI got a similar virus once but it was before bitcoin was popular. It just asked for money via credit card. The virus hid my files, and I needed them for work too. Fortunately the virus did that by some filesystem driver level hack, because after I booted into Linux I was able to mount the partition and get my files back.
- Intermernet 13y agoWe got hit with this last week at work. It was finally picked up by AV about 4 hours after it first got through the mail filter, but by that time we'd already had 5 users open the attachment. It's not a major problem if you have a good backup policy for both workstations and servers, but if not, it's one of the worst viruses I've ever seen. I've heard that some people have had luck paying the ransom, recovering the files and then doing a credit card charge-back, but luckily we had everything backed up so didn't need to resort to such measures. Just as an experiment, I tried decrypting some of the files using the Panda Security decryption tool being linked from various fora, but it seems to do nothing at all, and honestly I don't see how it could do anything without resorting to brute force.
- computerhead 13y agoor dont use windows...
- DigitalSea 13y agoThis is one of the scariest forms of attack on computing since viruses became prevalent in the nineties. The fact they were up until recently relatively undetectable adds another eerie dynamic to the situation. It highlights the aged old problem of people not pro-actively backing up their data offline until it's too late. Go out and buy a couple of cheap 1tb external drives and back your data up now and keep doing it, there are even tools and drives that handle this automatically for you. While ransomware isn't anything new, the fact that the authors of such software are using currencies like Bitcoin make it that extra bit harder to track and stop these people from extorting data. I sense a new wave of ransomware is about to hit the scene now that Ars have revealed specifics about potentially making millions a year from such a racket. It's hard informing people about these things without encouraging others to go and try writing their own ransomware and expect Bitcoin as payment. This really worries me.
- crazypyro 13y agoThe first thing I thought when I read the $5 million dollar figure was "Oh shit, imitators are coming..."
- grecy 13y agoWhen I first saw the title, I thought it went like this: 1. Your machine is infected, and it encrypts everything it can. 2. The 72 hour countdown begins, and during that time your machine has been re-purposed to crunch BitCoins. 3. All you have to do is wait 72 hours, and everything will un-encrypt and uninstall, leaving you perfectly fine. Creators profit by having millions of machines crunching BitCoins in their name.
- MiguelHudnandez 13y agoI was hit by this, or a variant, at my place of business. Hundreds of thousands of files on our shared drive were overwritten, about 2 TB worth of files. Office documents, PDFs, and Adobe documents like PSD and INDD were encrypted. JPEGs were altered but still viewable. All files increased in size by a few hundred bytes. Pull-only backups were the savior here, although because we didn't notice until the next day, the pulled backups on that system were also overwritten with encrypted/corrupt files. Luckily we had VSS versioning on the pull-only backup location. There was a close call in that the 2 TB or so of "new" data ended up pushing VSS over quota and we almost lost our good versions of the files that way. If not for the VSS versions, we would've had to resort to cold backups which would've been a bit older. As it stood, no file recovered was more than a few hours old. Auditing on the file share indicates which workstation was infected. Pertaining to that: it surprises me that in 2013, a default install of Windows will not log any useful information about shared folders by default. You must enable object auditing in Group Policy and specifically declare which users or groups are subject to said auditing on a share-by-share basis. In a world without logrotate, I suppose a sensible default is to just let a bunch of shit happen without recording it. What gets me wound up most of all is the amount of engineering involved for an average home user to protect themselves. I thought a Mac with Time Machine was enough, but a similar virus would easily corrupt those backups if they were available to it over a mapped drive. It is the goddamn 21st century, and users are still losing work by overwriting documents by accident, or opening a document as an e-mail attachment and not being able to find the actual file they edited. Should people really need an IT guy with ten years of experience to be protected from simple mistakes? Google has made progress on that front with the Chromebook, I suppose.
- tempestn 13y agoSomething like CrashPlan provides good protection against this sort of thing for home users. It includes versioned, off-site backups -- either on their servers for around $6 a month, or on a "friend's computer" for free. Either way, the backups are saved via crashplan, not with direct drive access, so it should be safe against this kind of thing. No affiliation, just a user.
- 13y ago
- fmax30 13y agoHuh , that is pretty scary add a physical packet snooper on all the traffic sent from my computer , it might be possible to mitm the private key as it is sent to the server. That way i might have a fighting chance against this.(if the traffic was unencrypted that is )
- spajus 13y agoIt's a pity to see that Windows haven't died off yet and things like this are still happening. Using Linux / Mac for years, never looked back. And for those who say "my mother can't use Linux", don't be a cheapskate, get your loved ones a Mac - they will definitely know how to use it.
- wbkang 13y agoKeep in mind this is not a virus in a traditional sense. The user has to explicitly run the executable to run this malware.
- joeblau 13y agoWow what a scheme. I mean it's almost the perfect situation for whoever wrote the system. It creates an extortion mechanism with a sense of urgency. Normally, users just carry malware around on their machine for weeks or months. The most frustrating part of this whole thing is that if you don't get the private key back and you're not backing up; you're toast.
- kbart 13y agoI imagine that this combined with virus capabilities (so it can spread itself via network) would be an overkill. Strange that they didn't do it, once you have an access to the local network (as soon as the initial victim runs .exe received by email) it shouldn't be too hard.
- anonymous 13y agoWouldn't it be possible to attach a debugger to a running instance of the virus and extract the key while encryption is taking place?
- Wicher 13y agoYes, but if they have their crypto stuff together, it might not gain you much. Someone here mentioned the encrypted versions of the files are the original size + a little extra. To me that indicates that they use a public key (of which the private component does not reside on your computer, and never has, but which you can buy). The public key is used to encrypt a key for a symmetric algorithm (AES, DES, ...), which encrypts the data, and the RSA-encrypted version of that symmetric key is then prepended as a header of some sorts. So using a debugger you'd be able to see the public key, which I suppose is infected-useraccount-specific. It's not useful for decryption, you'll need its private counterpart. You'll also see the symmetric key, of which a new (random) one should be instantiated for each file that is being encrypted. Should, but might not... if they slipped up, the latter might be reused (for your user account). In which case you can win, if you can observe it encrypting a new file — you'd be able to decrypt the other files too. They'd have to be quite stupid to slip up like this, but it happens. Update: Reading a reverse engineering report¹ it appears that it indeed works as described above. And yes, they didn't slip up; a new symmetric key is generated for each individual file. ¹ http://www.kernelmode.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2945 http://www.kernelmode.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2945
- devcpp 13y agoProblem is, the prompt doesn't appear until the encryption has ended, the key has been sent to the servers (it's kind of complicated, it apparently tries to find servers on its own, I wonder if it can be fooled) and that key has been locally destroyed. So, by the time the user is notified that there is malware on their PC, it's too late. People who know to detect viruses while they're running don't run attachments in the first place.
- Wicher 13y agoAccording to the KernelMode thread¹ the keypair is generated on the server. The public key is retrieved from it, but its private counterpart will never be on your machine. No key is sent to the server. ¹http://www.kernelmode.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2945 http://www.kernelmode.info/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=2945
- andybak 13y agoEveryone is talking about post-infection. However - this passage from http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/cryptolocker-ransomware-information http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/cryptolocker-r... seems fairly key also: "This infection is typically spread through emails sent to company email addresses that pretend to be customer support related issues from Fedex, UPS, DHS, etc. These emails would contain a zip attachment that when opened would infect the computer. These zip files contain executables that are disguised as PDF files as they have a PDF icon and are typically named something like FORM_101513.exe or FORM_101513.pdf.exe. Since Microsoft does not show extensions by default, they look like normal PDF files and people open them." I haven't got a Windows box handy to try this on but I assume there is at the very least an extra warning dialog when opening an exe - even a zipped exe? Not that that mitigates this at all. The inability to distinguish executables from data files - and although that doesn't apply in this case - the ability of data files to hide executable payloads either via design or error - is a major and currently uncorrected flaw in the system.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoWhy doesn't MS Windows use magic numbers to establish file types, or does it now?
- gbl08ma 13y agoIt does (I think), but even if it doesn't, it uses the file extension to determine it. However, EXE files are free to set their own icon. In this case, the icon of the EXE was a "PDF" icon. The silly bit is the fact that the file extensions are hidden by default, and users can only use the icon to check the file type.
- verytrivial 13y agoThis is the difference between crime and organised crime. People would not hand over the money to the burly visitors each month if their shop was burnt down anyway. Evidence that paying the ransom actually results in the files coming back is the most troubling aspect here - these people are looking to establish a longer term criminal enterprise.
- simonw 13y agoI talked to a small shop owner just the other day that had been hit by this. They said they spent the $300 on a new PC instead - but I'm pretty sure they lost a bunch of irreplaceable data (mailing lists, supplier details etc). Pretty heart breaking.
- amalag 13y agoCrashplan is really easy to setup. Won't save their data in hindsight, but they should have it or something like it.
- headShrinker 13y agoIs it the case that Mac OS default security setting would prevent an unsigned app like this from running?
- __abc 13y agoREAMDE
- swat535 13y agoI have a question regarding this, does anyone know what happens if your data is already encrypted ? will it encrypt the encrypted files?
- fantnn 13y agoYes.
- GillesB67 13y agoFor hacker having both an original file and the encrypted version that file should be relatively easy to retrieve the key? Especially if the virus XOR all or a part of the file. Otherwise a hacker may look at the random function that generate the key in the source code of the virus it may be weak and take values from the computer and time of infection.
- howlett 13y agoHow is this any different from a virus that wipes (not just deletes) your data? It takes the same amount of time (actually wiping data would be faster) and the result is the same: No data. Maybe the psychological part of "Oh God the file is there but I can't use it" or the fact it's ransomware?
- kalesoup11 13y agoThe wave of the future. Why break computers when you can just have the user pay you to avoid breaking it.
- tete 13y agoWhat I find funny is that this piece of software actually tells you more about what it does than software you pay money for and even uninstalls itself, after it is not needed anymore. It's kinda weird how malware is better quality than most other software.