Report: CryptoWall Creators Earned $325 Million in Bitcoin Ransoms
A cyber-security industry group has published new research on the CryptoWall ransomware campaign, finding that the attacks have generated more than $300m in ransom income and stem from a single source or entity. The report was published earlier this week by the Cyber Threat Alliance, founded by Intel Security, Symantec, Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet. Major takeaways from the organization's research include evidence of as much as $325m worth of ransomware victim payments and more than 400,000 attempts to infect computers with the third variant of CryptoWall (CW3), many of which appear to....
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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 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....
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....
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....
Victims of malware, such as bitcoin ransomware Cryptolocker, should just pay off the perpetrators if they want to see their data again, an FBI agent has advised. According to Security Ledger, Acting Special Agent Joseph Bonavolonta, who oversees the bureau's Boston office, told C-level executives at Wednesday's Cyber Security Summit they'd be better off stumping up the ransom. According to an FBI report from June, this sum can be anywhere from $200 to $10,000. Bonavolonta said: "The amount of money made by these criminals is enormous and that's because the overwhelming majority of....