'Two Weeks' To Prepare For Cyber Attack

Blowfish wrote: »

I should probably expand on the above. To paraphrase, this is what the NCA release actually said:

After 2.5 years and €100+ million worth of damage, we've finally managed to slow this f*king botnet down. We reckon we'll be able to keep it suppressed for 2 weeks or so before the bad guys work out how to regain control of it again. In the meantime, it would be nice if the general population would:

a) Stop being silly enough to click on spam link and install random untrusted software.

b) Clean up their machines if they've already done the above.

Of course Sky, being Sky, manage to report this as 'ZOMG! The world is ending in 2 weeks!'.

CountyHurler wrote: »

Nothing but calls all day about this....

Rucking_Fetard wrote: »

Who are these people ringing?

Age group and that...what do they be asking?

Just cuz it on sky news doesn't make this a new thing like....do they not realise this stuff is out there all the time.

All 500,000 victims of Cryptolocker can now recover files encrypted by the malware without paying a ransom.

The malicious program encrypted files on Windows computers and demanded a substantial fee before handing over the key to the scrambled files.

Thanks to security experts, an online portal has been created where victims can get the key for free.

The portal was created after security researchers grabbed a copy of Cryptolocker's database of victims.

"This time we basically got lucky," said Michael Sandee, principal analyst at Fox-IT - one of the security firms which helped tackle the cyber-crime group behind Cryptolocker.
Cash call

In late May, law enforcement agencies and security companies seized a worldwide network of hijacked home computers that was being used to spread both Cryptolocker and another strain of malware known as Gameover Zeus.

This concerted action seems to have prompted an attempt by the gang to ensure one copy of their database of victims did not fall into police hands, said Mr Sandee.

What the criminals did not know, he said, was that police forces and security firms were already in control of part of the network and were able to grab the data as it was being sent.

Analysis of the back-up database indicates that only 1.3% of all the people hit by the malware paid the ransom.

Despite the low response rate, the gang is believed to have netted about $3m from Cryptolocker. Many of those caught out did not pay because they were able to restore files from back-ups.

However, others are believed to have lost huge amounts of important files and business documents to the cyber-thieves.

"There's a bit of guesswork in that figure because some of it was paid in bitcoins and that does not have a fixed exchange rate," said Mr Sandee.

The $30 million estimate comes from a Geek.com article by Lee Mathews, and is based on the SecureWorks report’s numbers. The original report includes a speculation that at least 0.4% of CryptoLocker victims end up paying the ransom, “and very likely many times that.” The report also admits that “These figures represent a conservative estimate of the number of ransoms collected by the CryptoLocker gang.”