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Ransomware Assaults by Cryptowall 3.0 Highly Lucrative - CTA


According to a study by Cyber Threat Alliance about attacks from Cryptowall 3.0 ransomware, it's extremely profitable to launch these assaults albeit security researchers state that the risk can still be easily mitigated, published searchsecurity.techtarget.com dated October 30, 2015.

It maybe noted that an industry collective, CTA, was formed in 2014 with its members as Symantec, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks and Intel Security that wanted to assess the rising cyber threats. It mainly wanted to examine whether information sharing in an increasingly transparent way amidst so-called competitors of cyber-security yielded progressive research.

While conducting their investigation, the CTA specialists found an aggregate of over 4,000 malicious programs, 839 CnC (command-and-control) web-addresses, 5 second-grade CnC Internet Protocol addresses, and more than 400,000 infection instances occurring from 49 Cryptowall 3.0 attacks.

It was further computed that the gang responsible for the said attacks accounted for damages to the tune of $325m after contaminating an enormous figure of PCs globally. The region that the said attacks affected most was North America, especially USA.

The damage computed followed from an examination of Cryptowall 3.0 financial structure. As per the specialists, the attackers made use of several hundred Bitcoin addresses, with some through which victims were directed for paying the ransom as also depositing their key wallets, everything aimed for the cyber-criminals to collect their illegitimate earnings.

The Bitcoin addresses were largely utilized for laundering the earnings of cyber criminals into legitimate conduits else for buying services associated with exploit kit campaigns as well as botnets that would distribute spam mails.

The various Cryptowall 3.0 scams shared several key wallets leading the specialists to believe that a single entity was behind the operation of all the scams detected.

Nevertheless, to nip the problem in the bud, Product Management Director Perry Dickau of DataGravity a data security company stated that ransomware risks could be minimized with education as the first proactive step. Searchsecurity.techtarget.com reported this, October 30, 2015.

Dickau explained that Crypto kind of viruses usually attacked via phishing e-mails, therefore, an organization's responsibility lay in allocating funds for training its staff so they might better recognize the kind of dreadful messages.

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