| Evil Ransomware improvements we may see: 1. New address per machine (easier to detect payments made, hides profit total.) 2. Deterministic wallet stores all profit in a simple 12 word seed "password." 3. Phone numbers directly to bitcoin vendors. (people running insecure systems love phones.) 4. Phone number to tech support company that bills your credit card to walk you through paying the ransom. 5. Delayed symptoms. Secretly encrypt backups (windows efs might be able to do it nonobviously) Then once all your backups are secretly encrypted, it encrypts the key, and now you can't use backups to save yourself. 6. Advertise affiliated antivirus (I hear this is what cloudflare does by hosting bad actors, they inflate their demand from protection from bad actors, just a rumor though.) 7. Infect a friend. Get a discount on your ransom if you infect a friend and they pay. It doesn't seem reasonable that 300k infections= less than 1 in 1000 payments. Are peoples files really so worthless, or bitcoin really so hard, or people so untrusting of unencrypt. I imagine they could have sold their 0 day idea for more money to a whitehat perhaps? Maybe more generalized bug bounties could be deployed to offer financial incentive to harden systems and be non evil. |
I sometimes fix friends & older family members computers as a favor and I've noticed that they usually don't really have any files anyway. I always make a backup before reformatting them and usually it includes their bookmarks and maybe 2-3 random files scattered in their 'Documents' folder, none of which are important. Their machines are more like just gateways to the internet than anything.
Through machines moves over the years I'm sure I have multiple copies of the most important ones anyway (keys, etc). If not oh well, life goes on. Shoulda made backups in the first place if they were that important to me.