Essay On Ransomware

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Ransom by definition: a sum of money demanded or paid for the release of a captive. With this, one can somewhat tell what ransomware is - a class of malware which restricts access to the computer system that it infects, and demands a ransom paid to the creator of the malware in order for the restriction to be removed. Standing strong as one of the most destructive and profitable malware till date for the perpetrators, it is reported “Since last couple of weeks we have been seeing 500+ incidents per day of this malware. The incidents are being reported from all over India.” says Mr. Katkar, CTO of India’s leading antivirus software Quick Heal, dated early September.
Having first appeared in Russia in 2005, referred as Winlock, that successfully scammed over £10m from unsuspecting victims before the Russian authorities arrested 10 individuals for involvement in such hackings in 2010, however it hasn’t stop the growing number of the problem. With such profitable money to obtain, perpetrators have discovered new ways to spread the malware and to cash-in at the expense of victims.

At Kroll Ontrack, a data recovery service consultation firm based in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, has commented to have recently received an increase in the number of recovery requests from companies across Europe of having to be infected with various forms of ransomware. In addition, majority of these requests are still from Spain, but there are now a noticeable trend of frequent reports of new outbreaks elsewhere in other parts of the world.
Within just a few of years, ransomware have proved to evolve from a threat targeting Russian users, to an attack that now affects several other countries outside Europe. With such promising profitable business mo...

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...y up to $300 (according to latest record reported) to buy the unique key to decrypt the files as well as a time limit displaying within which the payment must be made else threatens that the unique key for the encryption will then become invalid, leaving the files impossible to recover.
However, the weird part about this scam is that the victims can't use their own credit or debit cards to make the payments – instead, they must purchase an anonymous debit card service (e.g. MoneyPak, Bitcoin) that supports anonymous identities of the perpetrators. Regretfully, most victims often go through the financial transaction, but in the end with their machines still locked, while the perpetrators walking away with the money. In addition, due to the extremely large key sizes the ransomware use, the machines that are affected are considered to be extremely difficult to repair.

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