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Jigsaw Ransomware Deletes Your Files If You Don't Pay Or When You Reboot Your PC (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers found a new ransomware yesterday called Jigsaw which will first lock your files and ask for a 0.4 Bitcoin ($150 USD) payment. If users don't pay, every hour the ransomware deletes your files. If the user restarts their PC, the ransomware also deletes 1,000 more files. The good news is there's a free Decrypter available to unlock the ransomware. The Decrypter was built by Michael Gillespie, who announced yesterday on Softpedia the ID Ransomware service, which tells infected victims what kind of ransomware infection they have by allowing them to upload an encrypted file and the ransom note.
I have to wonder what would happen if you just kept turning the clock back on your computer every 45 minutes... I guess it depends on how lazy the programmer was.
Anecdote: I recently had a WIndows Auto-update give me the choice between now and in 10 minutes for an update. I wanted to watch a movie online so I set the clock back serveral hours.
It's not mentioned in the summary, but if you take the time to RTFA (Yes, I know this is Slashdot, but still...) you'll find that this is Windows specific. That's not to say that an infection can't be devastating, or that people using Windows deserve what they get, it's just making note of the fact that those of us who don't use Windows don't need to worry about it.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Problem solved. Do it every week, or as often as needed.
What does someone like me that never jumped on the Bitcoin hype do? Just write the computer off as a lost cause?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Before they start preventing downloads/disabling USB and allowing access to any website other than Bitcoin buying and their payment page.
Is this ransomware named after the antagonist in the movie "Saw"?
If so, maybe we're seeing a new trend of naming viruses after movie villains, and they might even share some characteristics!
I'm hanging out for the Mugatu virus.
It's time to kill Bitcoin.
Kill it dead.
Shut down all Bitcoin ATM's - use hammers, thermite or whatever is appropriate.
Make it a felony to mine Bitcoin.
Make it a felony to use Bitcoin in any transaction.
It's sort of like nuclear weapons - everybody wants one but nobody should have one.
Some people are true assholes, poor fucking users who run into this. Imagine what will happen in the future, with self driving cars and somebody figuring out a way to take over and not let you out of the car until you pay, but if you don't pay within a time limit they will crash your car, drive it off a cliff or something...
Security needs to become part of culture, but with people sharing every bit of their lives on sites like FB, etc., with people not caring about NSA stealing their data... I don't know, there will be deaths because of this eventually. System security has to become central when relying on more and more computers and robots, drones, it has to be done.
You can't handle the truth.
It's time to kill hackers.
Kill them dead.
Shut down the hacker forums - use hammers, thermite or whatever is appropriate.
Make it a felony to mine Hack.
I'm serious.
If I lost files due to something like this and was able to find the retard who is holding my PC hostage, I'd gladly douse him in gasoline and watch him burn to death. Wouldn't even pee on him.
When someone finally finds the people who write and extort with this kind of ransomware, they should slowly and painfully delete body parts one by one until they pay up...
This might be a good time for Windows users to discover an open source operating system. I use OpenBSD on all of my systems and I am not vulnerable to shit like this.
So if you keep a second drive just for file storage, couldn't yiu yiu just power down and remove the drive? That would at least keep files safe.
Seriously, who uses C: for file storage?
"First things first, you'll need to stop the ransomware's processes. Open the Task Manager and look for the firefox.exe and the drpbx.exe processes in order to shut them down"
buying a new SSD for less than $100 and reloading Windows (or, better yet, ubuntu) looks a lot more attractive than dealing with an extortionist
I keep data on a second drive which I can easily disconnect if needs be. It is trivially easy for me to just wipe the main hard drive and reinstall my os (and apps), and I do this ever couple of years just to maintain good hygiene.
Needless to say, I also regularly back up important files to disconnected long-term storage.
Everyone should do this. It is in their own best interest to do so.
Some variants of ransomware erase backup drives and cloud backups/network shares.
The real way to solve the problem isn't just having more data for ransomware to encrypt or destroy. Work on pull based backups, such as Windows Home Servers, Microsoft DPM, NetBackup, or some other mechanism. Preferably something that can use SSH or an existing known good protocol for security. This way, one of the worst things that malware can do is output garbage and try to fill up the backup server's hard disks with stuff from /dev/urandom. If QNAP or Synology adds deduplicating backups to their units in a way that home users could just "set and forget" until needed, this would be a major step in mitigating ransomware attacks.
Problem is that ransomware preys on the fact that people tend to not bother with backups, and that the backup methods used these days are absolute shit and vulnerable to a "rm -rf". In the past, desktop computers would be backed up to tape, and with basic common sense, setting read only switches and backup rotations, it would be virtually impossible for stashed data to be corrupted. However, with both tape and optical drives not updated to handle modern capacity, coupled with the "just stash it on the cloud", it is no wonder why ransomware has such easy pickings on the home, SOHO, SMB, and even the enterprise level.
As a stopgap, one can always back up to a network share, then have the share backed up, so if the share is trashed, it can be restored. However, the real ideal is pulling data from clients.
Who actually gets infected by this?
The phone is ringing, I cannot linger, watch out butt here comes my finger.
Your files are AES encrypted.
There's a free decrypter available for download, which means someone found the key (or the way it is generated).
But the fact that they offer a decrypter without publishing the key (at least I didn't find anything about that, neither on their site nor through Google), makes me lose confidence in that decrypter. Where do you go if THAT turns out to be another trojan?
I wouldn't use it. You never know what is left of the malware.
Boot from the last known good backup and do a full restore.
Computers reboot themselves with no human intervention. It just going to piss people off and not generate much income. Brilliant idiots.
This is exactly why I run an autobackup of all my files to separate backup files every single night. The most I would ever lose is 24 hours of data.
This is 2016, folks. Ransomware shouldn't even be a blip on anyone radar by now.
Sure is convenient that all these ransomware app authors keep making stupid mistakes with crypto, that renders a decrypter tool feasible.
A suspicious mind might wonder if the author of the ransomware and the decrypter are in fact the same person, out to make a name for himself by 'coming to the rescue'.
self driving cars and somebody figuring out a way to take over and not let you out of the car until you pay, but if you don't pay within a time limit they will crash your car, drive it off a cliff or something...
That is both paranoid and nonsensical. What good would it to for someone to hijack your car and then destroy it? They've just wasted time and bandwidth at that point. If they're smart enough to get as far as to digitally hijack a car while someone is in it, they would do something smart like drive it into a space where the owner cannot physically climb out - or drop off the owner and then drive it to a chop shop somewhere. Destroying it doesn't get the criminal anything.
Security needs to become part of culture, but with people sharing every bit of their lives on sites like FB, etc., with people not caring about NSA stealing their data...
That is comical coming from you. You are here day in and day out using Slashdot to recruit for your religious movement. Your identity is well known as you post it in your profile here. Are you just hoping that you will yet somehow succeed in circumventing the US constitution and installing your religious leader as supreme POTUS-for-life and that somehow that will solve all your concerns?
Here's a hint: type Alt-F2, type "bash" there, and open a shell. Now, type {...}
Such a simple and straightforward procedure !
I wonder why everybody is complaining about Linux being hard to adapt to...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Who cares. It's a toy for retards anyway.
I know that I shouldn't be explaining my joke, but I was sarcastically referring that your "in linux, it's also possible to do lots of dammage without being root" instructions are nearly as complicate as the copy-pasta troll that was once popular on /. about the difficulty to get Quake running with openGL in Linux.
(As opposed to Windows where such breakage happens almost entirely alone, without nearly any user intervention required).
Consider it as a variant of the "Does virus {NAME} runs under Wine? Nope? Exactly what I though: yet another part of the Windows experience we can't join..." joke.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]