A few months ago, thousands of PCs around the world fell victim to Cryptolocker , a malware that falls under the ransomware category. Within a short period of time, unsuspecting users saw their files “ imprisoned ” and locked by hackers, who demanded a ransom to unlock them . The U.S. government, in a carefully organized operation, managed to dismantle the Gameover Zeus network and put an end to the hackers’ criminal activity.
However, the suffering is probably not over for the cybercrime prosecution services, as Cryptowall , a clone of Cryptolocker, has begun to take on epidemic proportions , infecting 625,000 PCs and a total of 5.25 billion files so far . The techniques that activate Cryptowall vary, as they can be through spam emails or through infected sites from which unsuspecting users download files carrying the dangerous ransomware. Even worse, the successor to Cryptolocker has the ability to infect files that are located not only on classic hard drives, but also on cloud drives , such as Google Drive or Dropbox . The way Cryptowall works is that in each file it infects, it embeds a different decryption key , resulting in only the one who knows the keys ( i.e. the hacker ) is able to unlock the file in question. In simpler terms, this means that unlucky users will have to pay the perpetrators $500 worth of Bitcoin in real money to unlock their files.
At the moment, it is estimated that most of the victims of Cryptowall are in the U.S., as 253,521 systems , followed by Vietnam (with 66,590) and Britain (with 40,258). If the authorities are unable to deal with the threat in the immediate future, then it is not excluded that Cryptowall will grow even larger, infecting millions of PCs around the world! In these cases, traditionally the best defense for the user is prevention, as you should always be properly shielded with security programs and above all not to open spam mails, but also not to download files of unknown origin from uncertified sites.
Source: digitallife.gr
