Microsoft Warns of ZCryptor Ransomware With Self-Propagation Features (softpedia.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report issued by Softpedia on May 27: Microsoft and several other security researchers have detected the first ransomware versions that appears to have self-propagation features, being able to spread to other machines on its own by copying itself to shared network drives or portable storage devices automatically. Called ZCryptor, this ransomware seems to enjoy quite the attention from crooks, who are actively distributing today via Flash malvertising and boobytrapped Office files that infect the victim if he enables macro support when opening the file. This just seems to be the latest addition to the ransomware family, one which recently received the ability to launch DDoS attacks while locking the user's computer.

Comments

Re:maybe its time to put msoffice into a VM?

[campuscodi]

Or use OpenOffice or LibreOffice instead. Heck, even Google Docs is better now.

Yet another reason

[FrozenGeek]

not to use flash. I understand that there are many companies with a significant investment in flash-based code. But flash has proven to be a persistent security hole. HTML 5 is a viable alternative to flash. time for those companies to suck it up.

Re: A permanent solution

[mspohr]

Might be easier to just install Linux.