You're infected -- if you want to see your data again, pay us $300 in Bitcoins

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/youre-infected-if-you-want-to-see-your-data-again-pay-us-300-in-bitcoins/

By Dan Goodin
Ars Technica
Oct 17 2013

Malware that takes computers hostage until users pay a ransom is getting 
meaner, and thanks to the growing prevalence of Bitcoin and other digital 
payment systems, it's easier than ever for online crooks to capitalize on 
these "ransomware" schemes. If this wasn't already abundantly clear, 
consider the experience of Nic, an Ars reader who fixes PCs for a living 
and recently helped a client repair the damage inflicted by a particularly 
nasty title known as CryptoLocker.

It started when an end user in the client's accounting department received 
an e-mail purporting to come from Intuit. Yes, the attached archived zip 
file with an executable inside should have been a dead giveaway that this 
message was malicious and was in no way affiliated with Intuit. But 
accounting employees are used to receiving e-mails from financial 
companies. When the receiver clicked on it, he saw a white box flash 
briefly on his screen but didn't notice anything else out of the ordinary. 
He then locked his computer and attended several meetings.

Within a few hours, the company's IT department received word of a corrupt 
file stored on a network drive that was available to multiple employees, 
including the one who received the malicious e-mail. A quick investigation 
soon uncovered other corrupted files, most or all of which had been 
accessed by the accounting employee. By the time CryptoLocker had run its 
course, hundreds of gigabytes worth of company data was no longer 
available.

"After reading about the ransomware on reddit earlier this week, we 
guessed [that it was] what we were dealing with, as all the symptoms 
seemed to be popping up," Nic, who asked that his last name not be 
published, wrote in an e-mail to Ars. "We went ahead and killed the local 
network connection on the machine in question and we were immediately 
presented with a screenshot letting us know exactly what we were dealing 
with."

[...]



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