'Breaking Bad' Crypto Ransomware Targets Australian Users

An anonymous reader writes: A new strain of the Trojan.Cryptolocker.S targeting Australia is using the branding of popular TV crime drama 'Breaking Bad' to theme its extortion demands. After encrypting all the files on the victim's computer, the ransomware presents a message that uses a logo and character quotes from the show, in addition to a YouTube video from the game Grand Theft Auto V, thought to be a tribute to Breaking Bad.

Comments

Re:these viruses are the end of computing

[njnnja]

It may be the end of local storage, but what does the average person need to have locally stored anyways? Purchased content can be more efficiently stored by the seller and streamed on demand. And for "irreplaceable" content like photos, I trust cloud providers to deal with grandma's pictures better than she ever could.

In the past, pipe size was the constraint that would lead people to store things locally but why shouldn't the average user leave all those headaches to someone else nowadays? More sophisticated users will continue to store things locally, but will also be better about off site backups and therefore less susceptible to this kind of ransomware anyways.

Re:these viruses are the end of computing

[o_ferguson]

Great, except most clouds store a mirrored copy of your local files, so when the crypto encodes them, your cloud will update and overwrite with the new, locked files.