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CryptoLocker Gang Earns $30 Million In Just 100 Days
DavidGilbert99 writes "A report from Dell Secureworks earlier this week reported that up to 250,000 systems have been infected with the pernicious ransomware known as CryptoLocker. Digging a little deeper, David Gilbert at IBTimes UK found that the average ransom being paid was $300, and than on a very conservative basis just 0.4% of people paid the ransom. What does this all add up to? $30 million for the gang controlling CryptoLocker — and this could be 'many times bigger.'"
The link is wrong
Or was this meant to trick us into reading about Zuckerberg?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Here is the correct link: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/cryptolocker-criminals-earn-30-million-100-days-1429607
Silence is a state of mime.
Link points to unrelated article about Mark Zuckerberg.
That's amazing! Though I am not sure what Mark Zuckerburg has to do with this though...
The link in the article points to a Mark Zuckerberg article.
The link goes to the Zuckerberg story.
With this level of evil, I think execution by prolonged torture may be appropriate for this scum. All these Russian brains being wasted on criminality.
These guys really do deserve the death penalty.
Here is the correct link to the CryptoLocker story http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/cryptolocker-criminals-earn-30-million-100-days-1429607
Does CryptoLocker actually do what it says when a person pays? That's better than a lot of commercial software I've used. The gaming, media, and high-level engineering software industries are particularly bad on this point.
You're in every goddamn device on the planet but you can't shut this sort of shit down?
Another reason to execute y'all for treason.
Microsoft security at work once again.
I don't understand what a user gets for their $300. It sounds like even after you pay, you're basically just back to where you were, before you installed the software. So why bother using it at all? Is this company just feeding on NSA paranoia?
Just look at those guys: they don't need to take our freedoms with draconian DRMs and bought legislation. Their programs can be freely copied, in fact, their whole business model depends on the software being copied at no cost!
What do they earn their money with, you ask? With high-quality cryptographic security service! Truly, a business model of the future.
They are not blaming pesky pirates for their losses, they don't whine that someone uses their work without permission. They work harder, are creative and produce high-quality product. And that is their key to success!
250,000 x 300 x .004 = 300,000, not $30M. Or do I have something wrong?
According to my math, wouldn't this only be $300,000?
250,000 * 0.004 = 1,000
1,000 * $300 = $300,000
The only way to get $30 mill is to multiply by 0.4 when calculating 0.4%
Where are the vaunted security agencies in providing protection for citizens? Should not the government have a hand in protecting its citizens?
250,000 * .004 * $300 = $300,000, not $30 million. I think someone confused 0.4% with 40%.
My guess is a government alphabet soup (KGB/CIA/NSA/whatever) agency. Seriously. Times are tough. Governments around the world are strapped for cash. How else is a government agency going have an operations budget? More importantly, why wouldn't an agency do this?
When they find these guys I hope they get a fair trail.. .. After which they're thrown in to a locked room with everyone who's lost data to their twisted scheme.
No sysadmins, though. You should know better. If a system you've been overseeing looses more than a day's worth of data to cryptolocker it means you had inadequate backups and and you should be ashamed.
Cryptolocker has been a wakeup call to everyone. It's a worst case nightmare. A hostile program targeting end-user systems with important data, intentionally destroying data.(And really good spear-phishing/social engineering work to help it find it's target!) It's made everyone re-evaluate backup plans, user privileges and privilege separation. Even things like shadow copies will keep you safe. (What's that called? File system versioning?)
Usually everyone thinks about accidental data loss, system failure, and data theft. Hostile, intentional data destruction is usually not even considered.
That's where the Mark Zuckerberg Link comes in. Zuckerberg will sell FB stock worth 2.3 billion$ & give the CryptoLocker guys 30 million $ from that.
Subject speaks for itself. Slashdot loses crediibility for every irrelevant article that gets published.
free the innocent stem cells
Huge difference.
This is straight out of a freaking Neal Stephenson novel!
"So, do you have a current backup?"
-- Every tech support number you'll call, anywhere. Ever.
And yet, the single most basic thing you can do to protect your data gets overlooked by hundreds of millions of people, because it's just too burdensome to drag and drop from "My documents" to "My external drive". Viruses, malware, and crap like this would have gone the way of the dodo bird if people would just follow the most basic. advice. ever. regarding the maintenance of their computer. You wouldn't run your car out of oil after neglecting to change it for 15,000 miles, would you? So why do you do it to your computer?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Crypto-Smasher V3.10 was used by Gary and Wyatt to make Lisa... just sayin.
Why not correct the blatantly false headline? Slashdot has editors, please edit! $30 million is 100 times more than the math actually adds up to. On Slashdot, I would expect simple math to be verified!
... I make 50 million every 2 days in eve online.
like maybe our government.
Since 2001-09-12, the day after a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the list of things deemed "giving [enemies] Aid and Comfort" has exploded.
The definition of DRM requires that the owner of the data and the attacker be the same entity.
If CryptoLocker has a chance to run, then the attacker has pretty much owned the machine.
Microsoft's brain-dead default of "hide file extensions" is cited in the article as part of the social engineering aspect that gets users to click on the files. It's the gift that keeps on giving... to black hats.
Hiding the file extension does NOTHING to make things easier on the user or make the UI any cleaner. It's not like we have 40 column displays where the file extension is "too long" and going to take away "screen real estate".
This has been going on literally for DECADES NOW. How can Microsoft be so blind? Whenever I get a new Windows box, it's the first thing I disable because if I don't, I'll just end up creating files with names like, "DailyLog.txt.txt".
Whoever is at MS, insisting that this remain the default needs to be hauled out, shot, drawn, quartered, and the pieces sent to be displayed in the lobbies of their 4 largest offices.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Modern computer hardware has inbuilt mechanisms that can make modern OSs far, far less vulnerable to attack. However, to evolve the OS software in this manner would lock out nefarious actions by intelligence agencies. So, for instance, Microsoft's Windows product are terrible by design- riddled with lousy coding, horrendous misuse of the memory management functions of the CPU, and no ability to truly isolate tasks running on separate cores. Amongst this chaos, Microsoft is free to introduce THOUSANDS of back-doors fro the use of the NSA and partners, using the crapness of the codebase as a standard 'plausible deniability' excuse.
Watch, for instance, how quickly the usual vile shills spout the line "do not suggest intent when incompetence will suffice as an explanation".
So those criminal gangs from Israel, that operate with impunity in zionist controlled regions of ex-Soviet states, are free to abuse the users of Windows in whatever ways they can imagine. The criminals usually have direct access to the NSA documents detailing the back-door exploits, due to the absolute partnership of Israeli and American intelligence agencies. Half of the US congress at least work as unofficial agents of Israel, and ensure that what the NSA knows, so does Israeli intelligence. And what Israeli intelligence knows, so do the criminal gangs in nations like the Ukraine.
The degree to which these criminals push their luck is driven by criminal logic. BUT the more criminals get away with a play, the more it is psychologically understood that the criminal mind will wish to expand in that area, even if it is obvious a public backlash is approaching.
Ransomware is a direct consequence of the ambitions of the NSA, the desire Bill Gates has to serve what he calls "the elite", and the servile relationship America has with the twin depravities of Israel and Saudi Arabia. No-one in power gives a damn about the inconvenience suffered by you and yours. The concerns of the racist lunatics that run Saudi Arabia and Israel trump yours, and those of other ordinary Americans, every time.
I believe I got hit by this about a week ago when I clicked on an advert linked on Chicago Tribune's website.
A fullscreen message appeared saying my computer had been encrypted and I had to pay $300 to decrypt it. I pulled my network cable out and had to power off my PC because the keyboard would not work. I was able to boot back up, but when I logged in both regularly and in Safe-Mode, a full white screen saying "please connect to the Internet" appeared and I couldn't use the keyboard again.
I pressed F8 on boot and booted into Safe-Mode Command line only. Once I logged in and saw the command line, I typed rstrui.exe (windows System Recovery) and using the Restore Wizard, restored to a checkpoint from a day earlier. I restarted my PC again and let it boot normally and once I was able to log in without seeing the message, reconnected my network cable.
My PC was never encrypted. The message only said it was. The clincher was before I booted Windows in Safe-Mode, I used a Knoppix DVD to mount the Windows partition and copy off my personal data before I started the recovery process. The data was perfectly readable and not encrypted.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
It seems to be telling us by price signalling that this is the more efficient way to earn money.
Wow, never have I seen so many unmoderated redundant and offtopic comments in a thread!
I'm seriously in love with your sig. Thank you for making the interwebs a better place.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
The plot of the book REAMDE centers around ransomware malware like this one. That is a great book!
Good luck fitting your laptop back in its case with the USB flash drive hanging out of it. Or do you work only with desktop users?
The ransom amount is fairly important. Consider at what point it is cheaper for one or possibly several vitims to get together and hire someone to track these criminals down and break their legs (or put a .22 in the back of their heads)
Even events of victims going after lower level 'farmed' operatives of these criminals would put a dampener on the same kind of activities.
And this is why I won't give up my ad blockers (and noscript) regardless of what "damage" I am doing to the net economy. It's a shame that the advertising networks are not held responsible for serving up this malware.
In my residential IT practice, I have encountered users - business professionals - who insist on keeping file extensions hidden.
Whoever is at MS, insisting that file extensions remain the sole means of marking a file as executable needs to be hauled out, shot, drawn, quartered, and the pieces sent to be displayed in the lobbies of their 4 largest offices.
FTFY
Change title from earns to extorts. It is ransomware.
The truth shall set you free!
Laptop users that I've worked with tend to use cloud backup, which I tend to encourage
Guess what a laptop user does when he runs into the cloud backup service's storage cap. He cuts down the set of folders that get backed up. Expanding offline backup capacity doesn't have an annual fee per GB like what iCloud, Dropbox, and SkyDrive charge.
I agree whole-heartedly with this.
I used to have a whole list of tweaks I would do to explorer on an XP machine to make it "ready for use". The first item on that list was to turn off Hide Extensions.
That, and show hidden files, are the only one's I still do routinely.
The first time an email cropped up exploiting the malware.jpg.exe "oo lookie, a picture" issue this (hiding information from the user) should have been dropped as the default.
Since when has hiding information ever made anything better? But what should we expect when they deciding to remove visual cues from their latest OS? Flat buttons anyone? Hidden magic corners (Linux distros jumped on board with that one too). Mobile OS's using picture buttons when you can't hover to see what it's going to do before clicking on it... but I digress
I refuse to sign