How My Mom Got Hacked
nytimes.com
How My Mom Got Hacked
1–10 of 111 posts
Re: How My Mom Got Hacked
#2> Welcome to the new ransomware economy, where hackers have a reputation to consider.
It's not new for organized crime to consider its reputation.
In fact you could argue that organized crime exists solely based on its reputation, and I would certainly argue that for CryptoWall. If nobody trusted that paying them would work, they would lose virtually all reason to do what they do.
I'm not going to defend digital extortion, but it exists because people pay it, and articles like this are part of the problem by making it known to Googlers that paying works.
It's complicated and I think we should think hard about where where we point fingers if we want to fix this.
Re: How My Mom Got Hacked
#3This may sound cliche, but ransomeware truly is plaguing the nation. 3 "phone room" busts here where I live in the last month or so, all of which were the "tech support" hot lines that you called into after you've paid the ransom to "fix your PC."
sure, there are many different levels of extortion. Some outfits are very upfront i.e. "your PC has been locked..." others are much more subtle and appear to come across as a legit operation and it isn't until you speak to your techie son-in-law that you find out you've been hit.
IMHO the best way to nab these guys is the phone rooms. More and more cities / states are requiring these rooms to have licenses and in my city the FBI has set up a temporary shop to go after these guys.
Re: How My Mom Got Hacked
#4Could the "one file free decrypt preview" feature be used to sniff out the crypto key required to decrypt all the other files? Or does the virus need to check in with the backend for every single file for unique keys?
Re: How My Mom Got Hacked
#5Could the "one file free decrypt preview" feature be used to sniff out the crypto key required to decrypt all the other files? Or does the virus need to check in with the backend for every single file for unique keys?
> does the virus need to check in with the backend for every single file for unique keys?
As it's based on CryptoLocker, all the files would be encrypted with the same key. After CryptoLocker was busted by law enforcement, "Fox-IT and fellow firm FireEye introduced an online service which allows infected users to retrieve their private key by uploading a sample file, and then receive a decryption tool" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptolocker#Takedown_and_reco...)
edit: technically the files are encrypted with different keys but those keys are stored on the victim's machine and encrypted with a single key -- http://www.welivesecurity.com/2013/12/19/cryptolocker-2-0-ne...
Re: How My Mom Got Hacked
#6This may sound cliche, but ransomeware truly is plaguing the nation. 3 "phone room" busts here where I live in the last month or so, all of which were the "tech support" hot lines that you called into after you've paid the ransom to "fix your PC." sure, there are many different levels of extortion. Some outfits are very upfront i.e. "your PC has been locked..." others are much more subtle and appear to come across as…
What exactly is a phone room and how will it help stop ransomware?
Re: How My Mom Got Hacked
#7Great article but I'm sad that it didn't cover what I thought the headline was referring to; how she was hacked to begin with.
Re: How My Mom Got Hacked
#8And that is why I have the "if you don't have backup, I won't bother to help you with your lost files" policy when friend or family come crying. I make only one exception from this rule.
Cryptolocker is not the problem. The lack of reliable backup is.
15 years into the internet age, and 5 into the cloud you have no excuse.
Re: How My Mom Got Hacked
#9I'm surprised that no one has fingerprinted the patterns that these apps take to encrypt the files, then created an antivirus definition for them. Surely they can't be that polymorphic that no one can catch them?
Re: How My Mom Got Hacked
#10My wife's father died about a month ago - two days after he died his widow got a call from some bunch of scoundrels saying "we need to fix your late husband's PC so you can get at his tax records"....
Fortunately, he never had a PC (he was in his mid 80s) so it was obviously a scam but we were all appalled at the cheek of such an approach and the for the fact that a lot of people, particularly the elderly in a moment of stress, would fall for such as scam.