Cryptowall Ransomware Nets $500 Bitcoin Payout From US Sheriff's Office
A county sheriff's office in Tennessee paid a $500 ransom in bitcoin after it became the victim of a cyberattack this week. As reported by Nashville-based WTVF-TV, the Dickson County Sheriff's Office ran afoul of a bug known as Cryptowall, a derivative of infamous ransomware CryptoLocker. Cryptowall is a Trojan horse program that, once inside a computer, encrypts its contents and triggers demands for a payment in bitcoin. The firm's estimates suggest that after being discovered earlier this year, as many as 1,000 computers have been infected. Detective and sheriff's office IT director Jeff....
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Dickson County Sheriff's Office said they had to pay a ransom - $500 in Bitcoin - to regain access to thousands of their case files which has been encrypted by a computer virus, News Channel 5 Network reports. IT Director Detective Jeff McCliss said: "Every sort of document that you could develop in an investigation was in that folder. There was a total of 72,000 files." The computer virus, Cryptowall, is a variant of the infamous CryptoLocker. In August, PC World reported that CryptoWall infected over 600,000 computer systems in the past six months and held 5 billion files hostage,....
The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that the the total losses generated by the bitcoin ransomware called Cryptowall have reached $18 million. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center stated that the agency received 992 complaints related to Cryptowall between April 2014 and June 2015. Bitcoin has typically been used by hackers as their means of demanding ransom from companies they've attacked with their malware. In Brisbane, a company has reportedly paid this bitcoin ransom but the hackers refused to back down with their demands. Bitcoin Ransomware Attacks. Typically these....
The malware authors making up the cyber gang behind the intrusive Cryptowall 3.0 ransomware, a strain of malware, have raked in an estimated $325 million from hundreds of thousands of victims around the world by demanding ransom payments in Bitcoin. The ransomware has been active since January, 2015. A cybercriminal group that develops and deploys Cryptowall 3.0 may have gathered millions of dollars of ransom in Bitcoin in this past year alone, a comprehensive study points out. Cryptowall version 3.0 the latest variant of a ransomware that is among the most effective tools used by....
Bitcoin ransomware has been a new type of malware attacking computers and networks all over the world. By decrypting all important file extensions, and forcing the device owner to pay a ransom in bitcoin to decrypt the files, assailants have found a new way to abuse the popular digital currency for nefarious acts. Even though it looked like this threat was “under control” for a brief while, a new version of CryptoWall is making the rounds. Unfortunately, the latest version of the CryptoWall ransomware has not removed the option for infected users to pay in Bitcoin. In fact, several....
Ransomware and Bitcoin make a great combination, but for all the wrong reasons. There was a sudden increase in the number of ransomware attacks earlier in this year which continued into the last few months. While these attacks continue even today, most of them usually go unreported in the media. Cryptowall is one of the widely used malware to launch ransomware attacks. The malware has been so good at doing its job that even the FBI has given up on it. What the guys behind it are using it for is a completely different story though. Who is behind all these ransomware attacks involving....