Intel Security Scares Ransomware Script Kiddie Out of Business

tdog17 writes: A criminal coder wrote a kit for ransomware that made it easy for others to encrypt victims' hard drives and then extort money from them in order to get the decryption keys. But when Intel Security wrote about the kit — called Tox — the author got cold feet. Now he or she is trying to sell the whole business. “Plan A was to stay quiet and hidden. It's been funny, I felt alive, more than ever, but I don't want to be a criminal. The situation is also getting too hot for me to handle, and (sorry to ruin your expectations) I'm not a team of hard core hackers. I’m just a teenager student,” the coder wrote on the Tox malware site.

Comments

Isnt' that beyond Script Kiddie?

[damn_registrars]

I thought Script Kiddies were defined as being people who ran scripts they downloaded off the internet that were already made for their purposes. The summary suggests this person wrote their own software. You could claim it is derived from other software, or perhaps even just a pipelined bundle of existing software, but it still sounds like it is a bit beyond just running a script.

Re:Uhhh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

It wouldn't be surprising. A first year student could write a program to open all the files on a filesystem, encrypt them and write them out. Nothing about what the software does is particularly hard or technically complex, it's just a "good" idea that he made into a distributable form for money.