Krebs On Security has a scoop his Blog Post one slick professional video advertisement for selling Ransomware technology.
(Above images are from a video Brian Krebs found that shows off Ransomware software you can purchase)
In case you were wondering what it takes to create Ransomware, the video that Brian Krebs found makes it obvious that the software was created with marketing and actual software engineering, giving many options to the buyer.
Options like how long before the files are encrypted, what files to encrypt?
.bmp , .doc, .mp4, .txt. or other options.
Should there be a deadline before the files get fully encrypted?
I predicted this sophistication of the criminal element as the money to be made is very large while costs are low. The ROI (Return On Investments) is as high as 1000%.
Unfortunately that old post was from June 2015, so at 2 years away they have gotten more polished and sophisticated. It would not surprise me if they had Project Managers and standard developer hires to create software pieces, as well as testing departments to see how the software would operate. Or English review. How this was done was with the large warchests they are making on unsophisticated people that are not spending any time on their defense.
With this one video at Krebs’ site we can infer as the marketing produced is smooth and does not have bad spellings or otherwise obvious incorrect grammar it means there is quite advanced Ransomware attempts on us.
This software that will attack us (or has attacked us) is not going to look like the old ransomware.
The basic issue is the same though – to defeat ransomware one must have a backup that is not connected to the computer that could be infected. Ransomware will connect to network and cloud drives to infect them. So make sure all your data is backed up. And make sure that the backup is separated from your computers. Convenience is now your enemy. If it is convenient to you it is convenient to ransomware software made with teams of developers.
So I implore you to think differently when building your backup processes and procedures, as you also have to audit the backup for a Disaster Recovery angle.
I.e. IF ransomware hits computer X and infects all the connected drives, now how will you recover the data? If the backup is on the drive and it gets infected now what?
Contact us to review and help audit your processes.