In all likelihood, the ransom note above is possibly what an already overworked IT technician of a corporate network is staring at at this moment. In addition to their woes, IT administrators are now burdened with the task of dealing with Cryptowall; a troublesome breed of malware which until now restricted itself to infecting mostly home users.
With gigabytes of confidential data available on network storage devices & tormented users willing to do whatever it takes to retrieve the company’s data back, life has never been easier for Cryptowall authors. Needless to say, it is only a matter of time before things take a turn for the worse.
To enlighten our users, we have already dissected the infection vector of this category of malware, discussed the possibility of retrieving the original files, advocated that paying the ransom is a bad idea and advised that prevention is better than cure, through blog entries available here and here.
To assist our customers, researchers at K7 Threat Control Lab have come up with reinforcements in this fight against Cryptowall. We have developed a heuristic anti-ransomware prototype which will allow monitoring, identifying and eliminating this menacing enemy based on run-time behaviour.
Samir Mody and Gregory Panakkal from K7 TCL will be discussing this prototype & presenting their paper titled “Dead and buried in their crypts: defeating modern ransom-ware“ tomorrow, the 2nd of October 2015 at the Virus Bulletin International security conference held at Prague.
We hope to see you all there !!
Lokesh Kumar
K7 TCL Systems Manager
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