Pay up or the PC gets it
Extortion, one of the oldest crimes in the book, has taken on an alarming technological twist. The FBI is warning that computer-savvy criminals have designed a virus that encrypts documents stored on a PC until the owner pays a ransom to unlock them. While the virus has so far only used weak encryption that is easily overcome, the fear is that it could be made tougher and start demanding large sums of money.
The virus searches a victim's hard drive and encrypts any text-based documents it finds there. The existing version then displays a ransom note that demands $200 for supplying the software that will decode the encrypted data so that it can be read again.
The novel attack exploits encryption technology originally designed to protect data, not kidnap it. To add insult to injury, it stores the kidnapped data in front of the victim's eyes, on their own personal computer.
The virus was discovered last week by the web-filtering company Websense of San Diego, California, when one of its clients' computers became infected. The malicious code is designed to take advantage of a vulnerability in the victim's web browser to download itself onto their hard drive.
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yeah this one is gonna be a fun one to work on...can you imagine if the program gets updated to maybe encrypt quickbooks files?
