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'Alarming' Rise In Ransomware Tracked (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Cyber-thieves are adopting ransomware in "alarming" numbers, say security researchers. There are now more than 120 separate families of ransomware, said experts studying the malicious software. Other researchers have seen a 3,500% increase in the criminal use of net infrastructure that helps run ransomware campaigns. The rise is driven by the money thieves make with ransomware and the increase in kits that help them snare victims. Ransomware was easy to use, low risk and offered a high reward, said Bart Parys, a security researcher who helps to maintain a list of the growing numbers of types of this kind of malware. Mr Parys and his colleagues have now logged 124 separate variants of ransomware. Some virulent strains, such as Locky and Cryptolocker, were controlled by individual gangs, he said, but others were being used by people buying the service from an underground market. A separate indicator of the growth of ransomware came from the amount of net infrastructure that gangs behind the malware had been seen using. The numbers of web domains used to host the information and payment systems had grown 35-fold, said Infoblox in its annual report which monitors these chunks of the net's infrastructure. A lot of ransomware reached victims via spear-phishing campaigns or booby-trapped adverts, he said, but other gangs used specialized "crypters" and "packers" that made files look benign. Others relied on inserting malware into working memory so it never reached the parts of a computer on which most security software keeps an eye. Ars Technica reports that drive-by attacks that install the TeslaCrypt crypto ransomware are now able to bypass Microsoft's EMET.
Once you're hacked the bad guys can do a lot of nasty things to you and your data, shaking you for a few bitcoins if you don't have backups is pretty much the cheapest way you can find out about having a security hole. Data theft, APTs or even remote sabotage by a state agent can cause a lot more harm than ransomware, often without you even noticing. The spread of ransomware is actually very good for security, because it brings hidden vulnerabilities to light and associates an exact cost to them rather than for example the nebulous cost of losing sensitive data of costumers. Thus, ransomware alerts companies to vulnerabilities and bad backup practices, provides a financial incentive to fix those problems, all the while causing much less harm than the lack of those fixes would. Ransomware is doing more for security than a thousand conferences could.
A lot of ransomware reached victims via spear-phishing campaigns or booby-trapped adverts
And this is why people use ad blockers.
Summation 2
If ads are where the viruses is, who can we hold responsible for them? The website hosting the ads, the company supplying the ads to the website, or are they hacked ads?
but it isn't like computers don't give you both ample means of almost perfectly protecting yourself, and ample means of recovering after the fact even if you failed to do that.
If you don't avail yourself of either, maybe it's about time you learned. People don't learn by being shielded from the consequences of their choices. The world does contain bad people, and always will, and what you should do is protect yourself rather than holding the unrealistic expectation that nobody will ever try to do anything bad to you.
I don't know the answer to the backups dilemma. About the only justification for the cloud I've seen is the ability to backup - although I trust my backup system more.
But the idea that the internet has to be a Game of Thrones type neighborhood is a little over the top. This is yet another example of the critical need for ad blocking, and script blocking. And if the mainstream sites don't do something about serving up ransomware and other problems with their ads, they'll just have to forgive me if I don't invite the Visigoths at the gates in.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.