Why ransomware? Let’s ask the bad guys [source: helpnetsecurity]
by CIRT Team
To be honest, this is not something that should come as a surprise. Many are involved with cybercrime because they feel that they are safe from arrest. It is also one of the few crimes that offer a helpdesk! Indeed within the majority of ransomware demands victims are given the option of communicating with those behind such malicious campaigns.
One of the questions we often ask is what do they criminals plan to do with the money they make? So let’s ask them!
The disguise
We figured that asking as malware researchers probably wouldn’t garner much of a response, so we spent a week eating pizza and playing video games to get into the character as students. Okay, that is very tongue in cheek and of course is a cheap stereotype.
What was the first interesting statistic was that about 1 in 3 of the email addresses were fake/non-existent. Think about that, it infers that almost one third of ransomware could potentially be pseudo since the promised ‘helpdesk’ does not even exist thus reinforcing the advice we give to NOT PAY ransoms.
For more, click here.
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