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'Breaking Bad' Crypto Ransomware Targets Australian Users

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-am-the-one-who-hacks dept.

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.

6 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. A new strain by Psychotria · · Score: 3, Funny

    The way these viruses are mutating, sharing RNA (code), and recombining to form new strains is ridiculous. My main concern is that my computer is in close contact with Windows, OSX and also Linux. Even if I was just dual booting Windows and Linux it would be bad enough. Dual booting with the obvious genetic soup it forms between the two different operating systems is a recipe for disaster. Such close contact between operating systems and a virus that mutates to form new strains, frankly, makes me quite uneasy. Because the operating systems run on the same underlying hardware, sharing the same genetics (opcodes) means that the likelihood of the virus crossing species (OS's) is pretty damn likely. We could seriously have an uncontrollable pandemic on our hands withing weeks unless the governments of the world (and their health organisations) proactively get together and tighten air traffic so that laptops and other computers come into contact. Without cooperation I fear that we face a pandemic that will make SARS look like a baby chicken (after it comes out of the egg all nice and fluffy).

  2. these viruses are the end of computing by slashmydots · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In a year, 99% of viruses are going to be crypto ransomware. It's a million times more effective than stealing bank account info or health records or credit card numbers or any of that junk that's basically valueless in 2015. If my CC gets stolen, you'd be lucky to use it in another state let alone another country. If you steal my bank account login, you better know all my security questions too once the bank sees an unfamiliar IP address and I'll get a phone call to verify a large EFT. But encrypt someone's files and they're likely to pay the ransom. I think the original ransomware virus got like $50 million+. The people behind these viruses will never be caught so until every government makes it illegal to pay these fines, people will keep doing it.

    1. Re:these viruses are the end of computing by njnnja · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:these viruses are the end of computing by o_ferguson · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      - In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
    3. Re:these viruses are the end of computing by Chewbacon · · Score: 2

      These ransomware viruses are getting more sophisticated. You can only combat that with a multifaceted strategy. I backup entire images to my media server. I also backup the irreplaceable stuff to a separate folder which my media server backs up to Amazon S3 via S3FS (shell scripts!). Finally, I have an external drive which I plug in and backup to once a week. It's cold storage which the ransomware can't get to unless I fail to realize I've been compromised when I plug it in.

      --
      Chewbacon
      The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
  3. Re:What does "breaking bad" mean? by neminem · · Score: 2

    Stupidly easy google search, "break bad" (because obviously "breaking bad" will just get you hits for the show): http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/...

    I didn't know that either - I always assumed it was a made-up phrase for the show that just sounded cool, but apparently it's a midwestern phrase meaning, appropriately, "to turn to a life of crime". Of course, now if you say someone's breaking bad, anyone, or at least anyone outside that geographic region, will just assume it means they're cooking meth. I've heard it used that way colloquially a few times already.