Numerous times you used to help your friends and people when their PCs fell to onslaught of malware. So did we. But we got pretty sick and tired of all that and pulled out a trump card by instead compiling a full guide that you can just hand off to the injured party and thus guarantee your non-involvement. Take it and put it to good use!
Previous part: The Children of CryptoLocker, Part 1
The first examples of malware that encrypts files and then demands money for decryption appeared a long time ago. Just remember Trojan.Xorist with its primitive encryption algorithm based on XOR, or Trojan.ArchiveLock written in PureBasic, which used regular WinRAR for encryption and Sysinternals SDelete for deleting encrypted files, and demanded as much as five thousand dollars for decryption. However, it was CryptoLocker that established the bad trend among virus writers to use the latest achievements in cryptography as quite stable encryption algorithms. Today, we will investigate several encryption-based trojans which emerged after the notorious spread of CryptoLocker on the internet (or at the same time).
The first examples of malware that encrypts files and then demands money for decryption appeared a long time ago. Just remember Trojan.Xorist with its primitive encryption algorithm based on XOR, or Trojan.ArchiveLock written in PureBasic, which used regular WinRAR for encryption and Sysinternals SDelete for deleting encrypted files, and demanded as much as five thousand dollars for decryption. However, it was CryptoLocker that established the bad trend among virus writers to use the latest achievements in cryptography as quite stable encryption algorithms. Today, we will investigate several encryption-based trojans which emerged after the notorious spread of CryptoLocker on the internet (or at the same time).
