Victims Robbed $18 Million since 2014 by Cryptowall - FBI

The register.co.uk reported on 24th June, 2015 stating that according to new data released by Internet Crime Complaints Commission of FBI, authors of Cryptowall have collected around US$ 18 million from US users and business houses only during the last one year alone.

The family of Cryptolocker-imitation ransomware has impressed itself as one of the most productive and capable since it was first detected in April 2014.

According to the US agency, damages across the globe is probably substantially higher; Australian victims constitute around half of revenue of Cryptowall and North America accounting for only quarter of the revenue.

Feds say that IC3 has received 992 complaints from victims of this ransomware who have lost amount between $US 200 and $US 10,000.

Coindesk.com published news on 23rd June, 2015 quoting FBI as "Several victims lost additional amounts towards network mitigation, network countermeasures, trouncing of productivity, IT fees, legal fees and/or buying of credit monitoring services for workers or customers."

Cryptowall is one of the groups of ransomwares which encrypts files on the victim's PC and then insists a ransom payment for giving the decrypting key. The infections actually start with either a phishing notification or when the victim visits a website that hosts an exploit kit. Some of the corruption depends on exploiting flaws in software on machines of users whenever the user clicks on the malicious link resulting downloading and delivery of the malware.

The family of Cryptowall has gone through many repetitions during its lifespan of around 16 months. Using Tor is one of the key changes made by attackers behind this malware in trying to hide its command-and-control infrastructure. Other ransomware like Critroni have implemented the same tactic.

The FBI alerted that the most of the attacks involve ransoms paid in bitcoin because it has a host of advantages including easy to use, fast and publicly availability, decentralized and provides a sense of heightened security/privacy.

Users are advised to not to pay any ransom amount and create a backup files in routine which is currently the most efficient method of recovering encrypted data by ransomware. Safe copies should be kept at a place isolated from the main workstation to make these copies unaffected by malware.

» SPAMfighter News - 6/30/2015