A number of users in Australia woke up yesterday to find their i-devices hacked by someone called “Oleg Pliss” who was demanding a ransom of $100/€100 to a PayPal account to unlock the device. There is a real Oleg Pliss and he is a software engineer working at Oracle but he is definitely not this hacker.
The ransomware attack has been confirmed by users of the Apple Support Community , where a customer (using the name veritylikestea on the Apple forum) relayed his experience as follows:
“I was working on my iPad a while ago when it suddenly locked itself, without me asking it to. I went to check my phone and there was a message on the screen (it’s still there), saying that my device(s) had been hacked by ‘Oleg Pliss’ and he/she/they were demanding $100 USD/EUR […] to return it to me.”.
“I have the exact same problem, with the same message from ‘Oleg Pliss,’” writes another user named Rojmer. “I guess I can delete the pandas on my phone, but is there anything better than that? I’ve changed my iCloud password.”.
iPads, iPhones and Mac computers in Queensland, NSW, Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria have been reported to be held hostage.
Of course, one security solution that will prevent hackers from holding you hostage is to use the two-factor authentication that Apple offers to its customers according to https://support.apple.com/kb/ht5570.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that IT security expert Troy Hunt says hackers are using weak login credentials from recent data breaches. Essentially, it's this: Using the same password across multiple online services can put you at risk.
“It’s very likely that all of this is happening because someone is leveraging the same password they found on another service,” Mr. Hunt said. “Regardless of whether you think it’s very difficult for someone to guess a password, if it’s been exposed on another service or you’ve exposed unencrypted data, then you’re putting every other service where you have the same password at risk.”.
