There’s a particularly evil piece of Malware doing the rounds at the moment, called CryptoLocker.

On infection, it encrypts files both locally and on mapped network drives with RSA 2048-bit encryption. The only way to regain access is to pay the people behind it $300, which a lot of people are actually doing at the moment.

The most common form of infection at the moment is via attachments on unsolicited emails, so be careful what you click on. There’s some good technical information on the Bleeping Computer website, along with some steps you can take at a Group Policy level if you’re responsible for a corporate network.

Yet another reason why a) you should take regular backups of anything important, and b) why “RAID” is not “backup.” Also of note is it’ll attack mapped network drives, so that backup you’ve painstakingly created on your permanently connected USB hard disk / NAS? Worthless.

Thanks Cougar.

Time to re-read Reamde?

I was just thinking that. But no, nobody’s got that much time.

Hmm, that’s a nasty one

So these people you have to pay, are they not…criminals?

are they not…criminals?

of course.

But that’s why it’s called ransomware?

More details in this article

Does this affect Macs or just PCs?

So these people you have to pay, are they not…criminals?

my understanding is that…

1. Physical crime is on the decrease.
2. That’s because cyber crime is now on the increase but it’s not reported in the same stats.
3. Statistically, you are now more likely to become a victim of cyber crime than physical crime.
4. Only one police force in the whole country is spending any real money on investigating and attempting to convict perpetrators of cyber crime.

Does this affect Macs or just PCs?

If it needs an executable to run, then just PC.

So if you keep your backups offline and isolated, problem solved?

If it needs an executable to run, then just PC.

Unless you happen to have a PC on a network of macs, which share their HDs to the PC. Or, if you are running Windows in a VM. Both of those apply to me, and I don’t like the thought…

MS needs to increase the AppContainers protocol to ‘normal’ windows programs (not just Metro). I think MacOSX has had sandboxing since Lion and they got really strict on it in Mountain Lion.

Bloody hell … what an interesting idea for extorting money from others.

Time to unplug external backup hdd …

😯

If it needs an executable to run, then just PC.

Surely Macs have executable files too.. they just aren’t suffixed .exe

“…be careful what you click on! more info Here ( Hyperlink ) love it. As easy as that…

Further to this,

http://nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/256-alert-mass-spamming-event-targeting-uk-computer-users

Surely Macs have executable files too.. they just aren’t suffixed .exe

In Linux-world the file would not have executable permission set after being downloaded because of the file creation mask (umask). In Linux the filename/extension means nothing, it is merely symbolic/information as to what the contents of the file might be.. whether you can write or read or execute, the permissions – that is the important thing and and whether the OS can understand the contents of the file

MAC being BSD based is probably the same

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Ah a windows executable

Buy Adobe software (and have your details exposed), Run windows after spending £££, pay for anti virus, be exposed to things like this

Or come to the darkside pay nothing and chill…