[SecurityRatty] tag: ransomware

Identifying the Gpcode Ransomware Author

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:23:32 +0000

Interesting article, but it implies that there has been a shortage of quality OSINT regarding the campaigners behind the recent Gpcode targeted cryptoviral extortion attacks :

"The individual is believed to be a Russian national, and has been in contact with at least one anti-malware company, Kaspersky Lab, in an attempt to sell a tool that could be used to decrypt victims' files. Kaspersky Lab set about locating the man by resolving the proxied IP addresses used to communicate with the world to their real addresses. The proxied addresses turned out to be zombie PCs in countries such as the US, which pointed to the fact that GPcode's author had almost certainly used compromised PCs from a single botnet to get Gpcode on to victim's machines."

In reality, there hasn't been a shortage of timely OSINT aiming to to identify the authors - "Who’s behind the GPcode ransomware?" :

"So, the ultimate question - who’s behind the GPcode ransomware? It’s Russian teens with pimples, using E-gold and Liberty Reserve accounts, running three different GPcode campaigns, two of which request either $100 or $200 for the decryptor, and communicating from Chinese IPs. Here are all the details regarding the emails they use, the email responses they sent back, the currency accounts, as well their most recent IPs used in the communication (58.38.8.211; 221.201.2.227) :

Emails used by the GPcode authors where the infected victims are supposed to contact them :
content715@yahoo .com
saveinfo89@yahoo .com
cipher4000@yahoo .com
decrypt482@yahoo .com

Virtual currency accounts used by the malware authors :
Liberty Reserve - account U6890784
E-Gold - account - 5431725
E-Gold - account - 5437838"

The bottom line - out of the four unique emails used by the GPcode campaigners, only two were actively corresponding with the victims, each of them requesting a different amount of money, but both, taking advantage of U.S based web services to accomplish their attack.

Summarizing July's Threatscape

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:08:24 +0000

July's threatscape -- consider going through June's summary as well -- once again demonstrated that nothing is impossible, the impossible just takes a little longer where the incentive would be the ultimate monetization of the process.

Russian hacktivists attacking Lithuania and Georgia, several Storm Worm campaigns, a couple of new malware tools, Neosploit team abandoning support for their web malware exploitation kit, CAPTCHA for several of the most popular free email providers getting efficiently attacked in order to resell the bogus accounts registered in the process, several copycat SQL injects next to the evasion techniques applied by the copycats, botnets continuing to commit click fraud and generate revenue for those who own or have rented them, an infamous money mule recruitment service taking advantage of the fast-fluxed network provided by the ASProx botnet - pretty interesting month indeed.

01. Decrypting and Restoring GPcode Encrypted Files -
The GPcode authors read the news too, and are catching up with the major weaknesses pointed out in their previous release in order to come with a virtually unbreakable algorithm. And since more evidence of who's behind the GPcode ransomware was gathered, vendors and independent researchers realized that the latest release is also susceptible to a plain simple flaw, namely the encrypted files were basically getting deleting and not securely erased making them fairly easy to recover.

02. Chinese Bloggers Bypassing Censorship by Blogging Backward -
When you know how it works, you can either improve, abuse or destroy it in that very particular order. Chinese bloggers are always very adaptive in respect to spreading their message by obfuscating their messages in a way that common keywords filtering software wouldn't be able to pick them.

03. Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail’s CAPTCHA Broken -
This has been an urban legend for a while, but with more services starting to offer hundreds of thousands of pre-registered accounts at these providers, it's surprising that spam and phishing emails coming from legitimate email providers is increasing. The "vendors" behind these propositions are naturally starting to "vertically integrate" by offering value-added services for extra payments, namely, scripts to automatically abuse the pre-registered accounts for automatic registration of splogs and anything else malicious or blackhat SEO related.

04. The Antivirus Industry in 2008 -
If it were anyone else but a security vendor to come up with such a realistic cartoon aiming to stimulate innovation by emphasizing on how prolific and sophisticated malware groups have become, it would have been a biased cartoon. However, this one is courtesy of a security vendor, and it's pretty objective.

05. Lithuania Attacked by Russian Hacktivists, 300 Sites Defaced -
This attack is a good example of a decent PSYOPS operation. Of course they have already build the capabilities to deface and even execute DDoS attacks against Lithuania, so why not put them in a "stay tuned" mode, by speculating on the upcoming attack and then executing it making it look like they delived what they've promised? This a lone gunman mass defacement given that the sites were all hosted on a single ISP, with no indication of any kind of coordination whatsoever. The same for the Georgia President’s web site which was under DDoS attack from Russian hackers later this month. Despite that the hacktivists behind it dedicated a separate C&C for the attack, one that hasn't been used in any type of previous attacks so far, they did a minor mistake by using a secondary command and control location that's known to have been connected with a particular "botnet on demand" service in the past. The second attack once again proves that you don't need to build capacity when you can basically outsource the process to someone else.

06. The ICANN Responds to the DNS Hijacking, Its Blog Under Attack -
The ICANN finally issued a statement concerning the DNS hijacking of some of their domains, which is in fact what Comcast.net and Photobucket.com should have done as well, next to stating it was a "glitch". The ICANN also took advantage of the moment and also pointed out that their blog has also been under attack during the month. There's no better example of how the combination of tactics can result in the hijacking of the domains of the organizations implementing procedures aiming to protect against these very same attacks. And while Photobucket.com remained silent during the entire incident, the hosting provider that was used by the Netdevilz team in the two attacks, since they were also responsible for the ICANN and IANA DNS hijackings, technological and social engineeringissued a statement.

07. The Risks of Outdated Situational Awareness -
Security vendors are often in a "catch-up mode" and if I were an average Internet user not knowing that real-time situational awareness speaks for the degree to which my vendor knows what going on online, I'd be pretty excited. However, I'm not. Prevx were catching up with a service which I covered approximately two months ago, I even had the chance to constructively confront with one of the affected sites on how despite their security measures in place, this attack was still possible. Recently Prevx have once again demonstrated an outdated situational awareness by coming across a banking malware in July 2008, whereas the malware has been around since July 2007, and earlier depending on which version you're referring to.

08. Fake Porn Sites Serving Malware - Part Two -
Yet another domain portfolio of fake porn sites serving rogue codecs and live exploit URLs, just the tip of the iceberg as usual, however their centralization is greatly assisting in tracking them down.

09. Storm Worm's U.S Invasion of Iran Campaign -
Stormy Wormy is once again making the headlines with their ability to actually make up the headlines on their own.

10. Mobile Malware Scam iSexPlayer Wants Your Money -
The best scams are the ones to which you've personally agreed to be scammed with without even knowing it. Like this one, which was tracked down and analyzed a couple of hours once a uset tipped on it.

11. The Template-ization of Malware Serving Sites -
The increase of fake porn and celebrity sites is due to the overall template-ization of these, with the people behind them basically implementing several malicious doorways to ensure that the domains get rotated on the fly. Despite that they all look the same, they all sever different type of malware, and zero porn of celebrity content at all except the thumbnails.

12. Violating OPSEC for Increasing the Probability of Malware Infection -
No better way to expose your affiliations and several unknown bad netblocks so far, by adding the netblocks and the malicious domains as trusted sites upon infecting a PC with the malware. Of course, the usual suspects lead the "trusted netblocks".

13. Monetizing Compromised Web Sites -
Several years ago, a script kiddie would install Apache on a mail server, they claim that they defaced it. Today, these amusing situations are replaced by monetization of the compromised sites, by reselling the access to them to blackhat SEO-ers, malware authors, phishers, or personally starting to manage a scammy infrastructure on them, by earning money on an affiliate based model, like this particular attack.

14. Malware and Office Documents Joining Forces -
A recent DIY malware kit, sold as a proprietary tool basically crunching out malware infected office documents, whose built-in obfuscation makes them harder to detect. It will sooner or later leak out, turning into a commodity tool, a process that's been pretty evident for web malware exploitation kits as well.

15. Are Stolen Credit Card Details Getting Cheaper? -
Depends on who you're buying them from, and whether or not they offer discounts on a volume basis, namely the more you buy the cheaper the price of a card is supposed to get. With the current oversupply of stolen credit card details, what used to be an exclusive good once where they could enjoy a higher profit-margin, is today's commodity good.

16. The Neosploit Malware Kit Updated with Snapshot ActiveX Exploit -
Since alll the web malware exploitation kits are open source, and leaked in the wild at large, their modularity allows everyone to easily embed any type of exploit that they want to, resulting in Neosploit's single most beneficial feature, the fact that certain versions include all the publicly available exploits targeting Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Moreover, the open source nature of the kit is resulting in a countless number of modified versions yet to be detected and analyzed, therefore keeping track of the exploits included in a malware kit can only be realistic if you take into considered the exploits that come with the default installation.

17. Obfuscating Fast-fluxed SQL Injected Domains -
Now that's a very good example of different tactics combined to attack, ensure survivability, and apply a certain degree of evasion in between.

18. The Unbreakable CAPTCHA -
There's never been a shortage of ideas, there's always been an issue of usability.

19. The Ayyildiz Turkish Hacking Group VS Everyone -
That's a pretty inspiring mission if you are to ensure your future in the next couple of years, by targeting everyone, everywhere that has ever publicly stated their disagreement with the Turkish foreign policy.

20. Money Mule Recruiters use ASProx's Fast Fluxing Services -
A true multitasking in action with a botnet that's been crunching out phishing emails, SQL injecting and now hosting a well known money mule recruitment service.

21. SQL Injecting Malicious Doorways to Serve Malware -
Constantly switching tactics and combining different ones to achive an objective that used to be accomplished by plain simple techniques, is only starting to take place. In this case, instead of a hard coded SQL injected domain, we have the typical malicious doorways the result of the converging traffic management tools with web malware exploitation kits.

22. Impersonating StopBadware.org to Serve Fake Security Warnings -
Typosquatting popular security vendors and services is nothing new, by having HostFresh providing the hosting for the parked domains promoting the rogue security software, is a privilege and flattery for the success of the Stopbadware initiative.

23. Coding Spyware and Malware for Hire -
Customerization -- not customization -- has been taking place for a while, that's the process of tailoring your upcoming products to the needs of your future customers, compared to the product concept myopia where the malware coder would code something that he believes would be valuable to the potential customers. End user agreements, issuing licenses for the malware tool, as well as forbidding the reverse engineering of the malware so that no remotely exploitable flaws could be, are among the requirements the coder assists on.

24. Lazy Summer Days at UkrTeleGroup Ltd -
Taking a random snapshot of the current malicious activity at a well known provider of hosting services for rogue security applications, live exploit URLs and botnet command&control locations, always provides an insight into what are their customers up to. In this case, centralization of their scammy ecosystem, and parking a countless number of rogue domains on the same server.

25. Email Hacking Going Commercial -
Cybercrime is in fact getting easier to outsource, and while the number of scammers trying to offer non-existent services, or at least services where they cannot deliver the goods, the business model of this service that is that you only pay once they show you a proof that they've managed to hack the email address you game them. How are they doing it? Social engineering and enticing the user to click on live exploit URL from where they'll infect the PC and obtain the email password, of course, next to definitely abusing it for many other purposes in the process.

26. Vulnerabilities in Antivirus Software - Conflict of Interest -
You can easily twist the number of vulnerabilities found in your antivirus solution, but not recognizing them as vulnerabilities at the first place. It's all a matter of what you define as a vulnerability, or perhaps what you admit as a serious vulnerability - remote code execution through a security software, or a flaw that's allowing malware to bypass the security solution itself.

27. Counting the Bullets on the (Malware) Front -
Emphasizing on the number of malware/threats/viruses/worms/slugs your solution detects may be marketable in the short-term, but is damaging the end user's understanding of the threatscape in the long-term. So, by the time he catches up with what exactly is going on, he'll recall the moment in time where he was using the number of threats his solution was detecting as the main benchmark for its usefulness. In reality through, the number is irrelevant from a pro-active point of view, with zero day malware like the one coded for hire undermining the signatures based scanning model.

28. Smells Like a Copycat SQL Injection In the Wild -
It was pretty obvious that copycats seeing the success of SQL injections the the huge number of sites susceptible to exploitation, would also starting taking advantage of the practice. Some are, however, targeting local communities and trying to avoid detection by using targeted SQL injections.

29. Click Fraud, Botnets and Parked Domains - All Inclusive -
The scheme is nothing new, what's new is that the botnet masters are trying to limit the revenues that used to go out to affiliate networks they were participating in, and are trying to own or rent the entire infrastructure on their own.

30. Over 80 percent of Storm Worm Spam Sent by Pharmaceutical Spam Kings -
With access to Storm Worm sold and resold, and new malware introduced on Storm Worm infected hosts used as foundation for the propagation of the new malware in this case, it's questionable whether or not the Storm Worm-ers themselves are sending out the junk emails, or are they people who've rented access to the botnet doing it.

31. Neosploit Team Leaving the IT Underground -
Pretty surprising at the first place, but in reality it clearly demonstrates that when you cannot enforce the end user agreement on your crimeware kit, but continue seeing it used in a very profitable malware operations, you basically shut down the support for the public version. The team is not going to stop innovating for their own purposes, and in the long-term they may in fact re-appear with an updated malware kit that's converging different services next to the product itself.

32. Dissecting a Managed Spamming Service -
Managed spamming services using botnets as the foundation for the campaigns are starting to introduce improved metrics for the delivery, as well as experienced customer support ensuring the spam messages make it through spam filters, or at least increase the probability of making the happen. This is an example of a random service emphasizing on the improved metrics they're capable of delivering.

33. Storm Worm's Lazy Summer Campaigns -
Looks like a "cybercrime intern" launched this campaign, lacking any of the usual Storm Worm evasive practices, no exploitation of client side vulnerabilities, as well as no survivability offered by their usual fast-flux nodes.

Decrypting and Restoring GPcode Encrypted Files

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:26:39 +0000

The futile attempt to directly attack the encryption algorithm used by the GPcode ransomware, is prompting Kaspersky Labs to invest in a more pragmatic solutions to the problem, with a new version of the StopGpcode tool released last week. More info :

"It turns out that if a user has files that are encrypted by Gpcode and versions of those same files that are unencrypted, then the pairs of files (the encrypted and corresponding unencrypted file) can be used to restore other files on the victim machine. This is the method that the StopGpcode2 tool uses.

Where can these unencrypted files be found? They may be the result of using PhotoRec. Moreover, these files may be found in a backup storage or on removable media (e.g., the original files of photographs copied to the hard disk of a computer that has been attacked by Gpcode may still be on a camera’s memory card). Unencrypted files may also have been saved somewhere on a network resource (e.g., films or video clips on a public server) that the Gpcode virus has not reached."

As the customer support desk behind GPcode pointed out in an interview, the malware is prone to evolve, and the simplistic file deletion process will be replaced by secure file deletion in order to render all data recovery tols useless, unless of course backups of the affected data are available. They often aren't, and depending on the importance of the files encrypted, the successful ransom is all a matter of the momentum.

"A person, presumably the author of Gpcode, contacted at one of the e-mail addresses left behind by the program stated that future development efforts will likely increase the key size to 4,096 bits, "if AV companies or other (people) crack the current key, but (that's) impossible. The self-proclaimed author, who used the name "Daniel Robertson," also said that other standard techniques to defeat antivirus will be added, including polymorphic encryption, anti-heuristic features and the ability to self propagate, turning the program into a computer virus. It well pays back itself," he said"

There are even more pragmatic approaches to dealing with this problem, next to backups undermining their business model. Try following the virtual money for instance.

Summarizing June's Threatscape

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:05:01 +0000

June's threatscape that I'll summarize in this post based on all the research conducted during the month, was a very vibrant one. With the return of GPcode, a remotely exploitable flaw in the Zeus crimeware kit allowing both, researchers and malicious parties to assess the severity of a particular banker malware campaign, the increasing use of malicious doorways next to ICANN and IANA's DNS hijacking, all speak for themselves and how diverse the threats and, of course, the abilities to maintain a decent situatiational awareness about what's going on have become.

01. U.K's Crime Reduction Portal Hosting Phishing Pages - nothing new here since vulnerable sites are to be "remotely file included" and SQL injected to locally host anything on behalf of a malicious party. Risk and responsibility forwarding is one thing, but having a crime reduction portal hosting phishing pages is entirely another. The phishing pages was shut down in less than 12 hours upon notification

02. Price Discrimination in the Market for Stolen Credit Cards - Tracking down "yet another stolen credit cards for sale" service in the wild, the price discremination that they applied greatly reflects the current lack of transpararency for a potential buyer of stolen credit cards, and how higher profit margins are driving the entire business model. With script kiddies running their own botnets and undermining the sophisticated botnet master's high profit margin business model by undercutting their prices, stolen credit cards are not what they used to be - an exclussive good. Nowadays, they are a commodity good and often a bargain

03. Blackhat SEO Redirects to Malware and Rogue Software - Sampling an active blackhat SEO campaign out of the hundreds of thousands currently active online, releaved a large portfolio of domains serving Zlob variants by pitching them as fake codecs that the end user should download if they are to view the non existent adult content at the sites. Where's the OSINT mean? It's in the fact that the codecs and the fake security software phone back to UkrTeleGroup Ltd's network

04. Using Market Forces to Disrupt Botnets - With the current oversupply of malware infected hosts, and botnet masters embracing the services model for anything malicious, in this post I discussed the radical security approach of puchasing already infected malware hosts on a per country basis, disinfecting them and forcing them to update all the software on the infected PCs. Of course, on an opt-in basis. The possibility to directly provide incentives for botnet hunters to shut down whatever they come across to on a daily basis, and that's a lot of botnets, is also there

05. Who's Behind the GPcode Ransomware? - The title speaks for itself, the research with enough actionable intelligence gathered in the shortest timeframe possible is already proving accurate and highly valuable. How come? Stay tuned for more developments

06. ImageShack Typosquatted to Serve Malware - In a rare instance of a creative attack combining typosquatting in order to impersonate ImageShack and serve malware by redirecting users to an image file that is actually forwarding to the binary, I was recently tipped by the folks at TrendMicro who are also following this that the site is up and running again. Not for long

07. Fake YouTube Site Serving Flash Exploits - Next to using the usual set of exploits courtesy of a commodity web malware exploitation kit, this campaign was also using flash exploits. Even more interesting is the fact that the password stealer obtained was attempting to phone back to a misconfigured malware command and control interface, basically allowing you to assess the campaign from the eyes of the "campaigner"

08. Monetizing Web Site Defacements - Web site defacements are getting monetized just like SQL injections are in order to locally host a blackhat search engine optimization campaign on a vulnerable site with a high page rank. In this post I've assessed such monetization courtesy of a web site defacer at The Africa Middle Market Fund

09. Malicious Doorways Redirecting to Malware - Yet another large domains portfolio exposed though a malicious doorway redirecting to fake porn and video sites serving Zlob variants, tracking down the initial spamming of the malicious doorways across multiple vulnerable forums and guestbooks

10. The Zeus Crimeware Kit Vulnerable to Remotely Exploitable Flaw - When cyber criminals get advised to patch their vulnerable versons of the Zeus Crimeware Kit, you know there's a monoculture in the crimeware market. This flaw released publicly in May, 2008, not just allows others to hijack someone's ebanking botnet, but also, vendors and researchers to better assess a vulnerable Zeus command and control location

11. Fake Celebrity Video Sites Serving Malware - When templates for fake video and adult sites are just as available as they are now, anyone can take advantage of this cheap social engineering track that seems to work just fine. Compared to relying on blackhat search optimization to acquire traffic, some of the campaigns were SQL injected at vulnerable sites in order to drive traffic to them, next to several other tactics which when combined can result in a lot of people unknowingly visiting the sites

12. Phishing Campaign Spreading Across Facebook - An internal phishing campaign was circulating across Facebook, which got taken care of thanks to coordinated efforts with Facebook's security folks. There's also an indicating tha they are currently typosquatting other social networking sites like Hi5 for instance

13. Underground Multitasking in Action - As a firm believed in taking a random sample for a particular threat segment, this was once of these cases confirming the confidence I've built into anticipating upcoming tactics and strategies to be used

14. An Update to Photobucket's DNS Hijacking - Despite that Photobucket didn't oficially acknowledge the DNS hijacking, the hosting provider the NetDevilz hacking team used issued a statement. Ironically, the Turkish hacking group used the same provider weeks later to redirect ICANN and IANA's domains to Atspace.com

15. Fake Porn Sites Serving Malware - Among the largest domains portfolio of malware serving porn sites I've exposed in a while, all of them naturally remain active since they are hosted on a partition of RBN's diverse network. Visualizing a malicious doorway or the entire ecosystem provides a better understanding at how structured the ecosystems are

16. Backdoording Cyber Jihadist Ebooks for Surveillance Purposes - Despite that in this case we have a cyber jihadist backdoording his own released books, the international intelligence community next to law enforcement are known to have expressed interest in backdooring suspect's PCs, so why not SQL inject the cyber jihadist forums themselves?
17. Right Wing Israeli Hackers Deface Hamas's Site - When you read that Hamas's site is hacked, you ask yourself the following, do they even have a web site that's up the running? The answer to which would be the fact that even Hezbollah has been maintaining an Internet infrastructure since 1998
18. ICANN and IANA's Domain Names Hijacked by the NetDevilz Hacking Group - A fact is a fact, no comment here, go through all the technical details of the hijacking, including some actionable intelligence on who's behind the hijacking
19. The Malicious ISPs You Rarely See in Any Report - Who's tolerating malicious activities on their network, and how is the RBN related to all this? Well, when combined, the tiny parts of these ISPs represent a tiny part of the Russian Business Network itself

Ransomware

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:09:52 +0000

I've never figured out the fuss over ransomware:

Some day soon, you may go in and turn on your Windows PC and find your most valuable files locked up tighter than Fort Knox.
You'll also see this message appear on your screen:

"Your files are encrypted with RSA-1024 algorithm. To recovery your files you need to buy our decryptor. To buy decrypting tool contact us at: ********@yahoo.com"

How is this any worse than the old hacker viruses that put a funny message on your screen and erased your hard drive?

Here's how I see it, if someone actually manages to pull this up and put it into circulation, we're looking at malware Armegeddon. Instead of losing 'just' your credit card numbers or having your PC turned into a spam factory, you could lose vital files forever.
Of course, you could keep current back-ups. I do, but I've been around this track way too many times to think that many companies, much less individual users, actually keep real back-ups. Oh, you may think you do, but when was the last time you checked to see if the data you saved could actually be restored?

The single most important thing any company or individual can do to improve security is have a good backup strategy. It's been true for decades, and it's still true today.

Researchers urge ransomware victims to try file-recovery app

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:00:00 +0000

Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab is telling ransomeware victims of Gpcode.ak how to recover data thought lost to the extortionists.

Ransomware Encrypts Victim Files With 1024-Bit Key

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:48:17 +0000

A dangerous new strain of malicious software that holds the victim's computers files for ransom has been unleashed, and researchers have yet to crack the encryption key.

Who's Behind the GPcode Ransomware?

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:44:53 +0000

So, the ultimate question - who's behind the GPcode ransomware? It's Russian teens with pimples, using E-gold and Liberty Reserve accounts, running three different GPcode campaigns, two of which request either $100 or $200 for the decryptor, and communicating from Chinese IPs. Here are all the details regarding the emails they use, the email responses they sent back, the currency accounts, as well their most recent IPs used in the communication :

Emails used by the GPcode authors where the infected victims are supposed to contact them :
content715@yahoo.com
saveinfo89@yahoo.com
cipher4000@yahoo.com
decrypt482@yahoo.com

Virtual currency accounts used by the malware authors :
Liberty Reserve - account U6890784
E-Gold - account - 5431725
E-Gold - account - 5437838

Sample response email :
"Next, you should send $100 to Liberty Reserve account U6890784 or E-Gold account 5431725 (www.e-gold.com) To buy E-currency you may use exchange service, see or any other. In the transfer description specify your e-mail. After receive your payment, we send decryptor to your e-mail. For check our guarantee you may send us one any encrypted file (with cipher key, specified in any !_READ_ME_!.txt file, being in the directorys with the encrypted files). We decrypt it and send to you originally decrypted file. Best Regards, Daniel Robertson"

Second sample response email this time requesting $200 :
"The price of decryptor is 200 USD. For payment you may use one of following variants: 1. Payment to E-Gold account 5437838 (www.e-gold.com). 2. Payment to Liberty Reserve account U6890784 (www.libertyreserve.com). 3. If you do not make one of this variants, contact us for decision it. For check our guarantee you may send us ONE any encrypted file. We decrypt it and send to you originally decrypted file. For any questions contact us via e-mail. Best regards. Paul Dyke"

So, you've got two people responding back with copy and paste emails, each of them seeking a different amount of money? Weird. The John Dow-ish Daniel Robertson is emailing from 58.38.8.211 (Liaoning Province Network China Network Communications Group Corporation No.156,Fu-Xing-Men-Nei Street, Beijing 100031), and Paul Dyke from 221.201.2.227(Liaoning Province Network China Network Communications Group Corporation No.156,Fu-Xing-Men-Nei Street, Beijing 100031), both Chinese IPs, despite that these campaigners are Russians.

Here are some comments I made regarding cryptoviral extortion two years ago - Future Trends of Malware (on page 11; and page 21), worth going through.

Security Briefing: June 9th

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 07:29:02 +0000

What fresh hell is this? Monday morning and the coffee machine decides to tangle with me. The missus saves the day and potentially my sanity.

So, will the iPhone (officially) come to Canada in the WWDC keynote this morning? What say you Vegas?

Click here to subscribe to Liquidmatrix Security Digest!

And now, the news…

Security firm asks for help cracking ransomware key | Computer World
Revisiting the Safari Vulnerability on Windows | Washington Post
A rallying cry against cyberbullying | CNET
HP secures data center assets with RFID tags | Network World
Hans Reiser Offers To Lead Cops to Nina’s Body | OS News
Full-featured IE 8 beta announced (smashy, smashy) | NZ Herald
Fraudsters hack into Home Office website | Telegraph
IBM sings a Symphony to rival Office | Silicon
Military Supercomputer Sets Record | NY Times

Tags: News, Daily Links, Security Blog, Information Security, Security News

Security firm asks for help cracking ransomware key

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 09:00:00 +0000

Anti-virus firm Kapersky Lab is seeking help cracking an encryption key that's part of an extortion scheme seeking money from users whose PCs have been infected by malware.