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Ransomware Attacks Rise, New Trojan.Ransomlock.Y Responsible for Hike

While businesses are chiefly threatened with Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, ransomware assaults are being waged in increasing numbers as well as more efficaciously against consumers, feel researchers of Symantec, the security company. It appears, a most recent ransomware namely Trojan.Ransomlock.Y was observed recording a hike globally during the 3rd-week of January 2013, says Symantec.

Additionally according to Symantec, although multiple versions of Ramsomlock led to the general hike in ransomware threats, the key version targeting end-users has been Trojan.Ransomlock.Y. The particular version is getting disseminated via porn-serving websites that are responsible for the Impact Exploit toolkit.

Meanwhile, it was January 25, 2013 when Fortinet announced one same kind of alert. The company's researchers found one fresh ransomware strain, which emerged from the Sasfis network-of-bots that notoriously spreads fake anti-virus software. The malware is pretty nasty, comments Fortinet. For, undoing it incase it managed to infect any system, was quite cost, effort and time consuming. The researchers also think that with Sasfis responsible for the ransomware, it will enable the latter to propagate really fast thus boosting the income of its financers.

In January 2013, it had also become known that the developers of one freshly introduced Cool attack toolkit were the same gangsters who created BlackHole, while there was a $100K budget for Cool users towards purchasing and creating fresh attack codes. Both BlackHole and Cool have an enormous utility for serving another ransomware called Reveton.

And as 2012 ended, security companies made a forecast of possible increase in ransomware operation, which seemingly has proved correct.

Moreover, Symantec observes that ransomware money-extraction campaigns have been going on since many years now, however, cyber-criminals are popularly using them since the past 2-years only while they keep on randomly inflicting computer-users more and more.

Nevertheless, security specialists advise Web-surfers that they mustn't pay up in response to such ransomware alerts as it's for sure that their PCs won't get unlocked despite forwarding of the payment. In addition, victims who once make the payment are chanced to become targets of more cyber-crime scams in future, the experts warn.

Related article: Ransomware Trojan Asks for $300 for Giving User Data Back

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