The SC Magazine has a story about this phenomenon:
‘Big Head’ malware threat looms, warn researchers:
“In a report posted Friday, Trend Micro said while there was no evidence as yet Big Head had been used successfully, its developers appeared to be experienced, although possibly not sophisticated, threat actors.”
The way it is being spread around the Internet is through sophisticated Microsoft ads. I.e. making people think they need to click on the ad as it requires an “update” or requires a phone call to Microsoft.
To illustrate a fake Microsoft ad there is one here on this page.
We made the image obviously fake(although this is somewhat what they look like) – but even if there are no spelling mistakes or other items being more believable the bottom line is: Microsoft does not create popups that ask for money, “click on this to fix you computer”.
And Microsoft would never hold out help for crypto currency…
We have to get better at seeing these hack attacks as they are similar and we have to start to be skeptical so that we do not get attacked.
What if you get hit with Ransomware? what can you do to bring operations back? Paying the ransomware criminal actors is unwise as this can happen again and one cannot trust the criminals. The best solution is to create a backup.
Make sure and cover yourselves in many ways – patching, backing up, social engineering awareness. Together you can create a policy that protects your computers.
Schrodinger’s Backup: “The condition of any backup is unknown until a restore is attempted.”