What Is Ransomware: How it works and how to remove it

What is Ransomware?

Ransomware is a piece of malicious software that encrypts users’ important stored inside their systems. The motive of the attackers is to extort illicit money from the victimized users. And hence, soon after the successful data encryption, a crypto-virus demands a huge amount of ransom from the victims in order to obtain the decryption software and regain access to the locked files. Malware drops a ransom note on each affected folder that includes instruction on how to pay the demanded fee to get the required decryptor. The ransom amount may vary from a few hundred dollars to thousands that are usually paid in crypto-currency like BitCoins or others.

How Does a Ransomware Work?

A file-encoding malware can get into the targeted computers through various deceptive techniques. Nevertheless, the most common delivery method is spam email campaign. In this campaign, hackers send a number of deceptive emails to the users that are often disguised as ‘important’, ‘official’ or coming from popular company or institution.

However, these mails include malicious attachments that are in multiple forms such as Microsoft Office or PDF documents, executable files, achieves so on. As soon as they are opened, run or otherwise executed, they start the crypto-virus infection process. These attachments can take over the victims’ devices particularly if they have built-in social engineering tools that deceive users into allowing administrative access. Some other more dangerous kind of ransomware exploit security goals to infected PCs without requiring users’ approval.

Once a ransomware gets into the targeted computer, it can do several things amoung which, the most common action is to lock some or all of the users’ data. After that, the compromised files can’t be decrypted without a unique (mathematical) key which only attackers can provide. The affected people are presented with a message explaining that their files are now inaccessible and will only be unlocked if the victims transfer an untraceable BitCoin payment to the criminals crypto-wallet address.

Sometimes, the hackers might claim to be a law enforcement agency shutting down the victims’ device due to the presence of pornography or pirated software on it and then demand extortion as “fine”, so that victims don’t consider reporting the attack to authorities. In some cases, criminals intimidate to publicize the important data if the demanded ransom is not paid. But, data encryption is by far the most common technique to attempt extorting money from the victimized people.

Who Is The Target of A Ransomware?

Cyber criminals choose the organizations with different ways to attack with crypto-virus. Sometimes, they might target universities because they often have smaller security teams and a desperate user base that does various file sharing that makes the virus easier to gain access to their defenses. In addition, organizations such as government agencies or medical facilities generally need immediate access to their files and hence, they are persuasive targets of ransomware developers. Law firms and organizations who have sensitive data may be eager to make the demanded payment to keep news of a compromise quiet. These firms may be individually sensitive to leakware attacks. However, even if you don’t belong to one of those categories, you can still be victim of a crypto-malware since some of these viruses spread automatically and arbitrarily across the web.

How To Prevent Ransomware Attacks

To avoid the risk of being infected with a file-encrypting malware, you can apply several defensive steps. These steps are good security practices in common, so you should follow them to enhance your defences from all sorts of attacks:

• Don’t install software or let it take administrative privileges unless you clearly know about its functionalities.
• Keep your operating system patched and up-to-date to make sure you have less exposure to exploit.
• Keep backing up your files on a constant basis and automatically! Backups won’t stop from ransomware attacks but it can make the damage less significant as you can later on restore the infected data using this after getting rid of the virus.

How To Remove Ransomware

If your PC is infected with a kind of file-encoding threat, you need to regain access to the work-station. Steps given below will help you to regain control of your Windows 10 device:

• Restart Windows 10 to safe mode
• Install antimalware software
• Scan the device to find the ransomware program
• Restore the PC to an earlier state

While going through these steps, it is important to keep in mind that these steps can terminate the virus from your computer and restore it your control, it will not decrypt the encrypted data. Their transformation into unreadanility has already taken place, and if the data have been locked with a sophisticated algorithm, it will be mathematical impossible for the victims to decode them without having a unique key which only attackers can provide. In fact, by removing the virus, you have ended the possibility of making payment to the hackers to restore the locked data.

Facts And Figures Of Ransomware:

Crypto-virus is a big source of income for cyber criminals. There is a lot of money in it and the market has quickly expanded from the start of the decade. In 2017, crypto-virus caused $5 billion losses, both in terms of extortion paid and spending and lost time in recovering from attacks. That’s up 15 times from 2015. In the first quarter of 2018, just one ransomware infection, SamSam, gathered a $1 million in ransom money.

Some markets are mainly prone to crypto-virus and to paying the demanded fee. Many big-level ransomware attacks have taken place in hospitals or other medical organizations that make enticing targets: attackers have got idea about that. These organizations are more likey to simple make the payment to get rid of the issue. According to estimates, 45 percent of ransomware attacks target healthcare orgs, and, equally, that 85 percent of malware infections at healthcare orgs are file-encrypting virus. The financial services sector is another persuasive industry, which is, as Willie Sutton famously remarked, where the money is. It’s expected that 90 percent of financial institutions were targeted by a ransomware attack in 2017.

Ransomware is turning down?

In various ways, it’s an economic decision based on the attackers’ currency of choice: bitcoin. Extracting a sum of payment from a victim has always been hit or miss; they might not make a decision to pay, or even if they want to, they might not be familiar enough with bitcoin to figure out how to actually do so.

The decline in crypto-malware has been matched by an increment in so-called cryptomining virus that infects the PCs and uses its computing power to mine bitcoin cryptocurrency without letting the owner know. This is a precise route to employing users’ resources to get bitcoin that evades most of the troubles in scoring a ransom, and it has only become more eye-catching as a cyberattack as the price of bitcoin spiked in late 2017.

However, that doesn’t mean that the risk is over. the crypto-virus attackers are of two types: “commodity” attacks that try to compromise devices arbitrarily by sheer volume and comprise so-called “ransomware as a service: platforms that hackers can rent; and targeted groups that focus on mainly defenseless market segments and enterprises. You need to be on defense if you belong to an organization, no matter if the big ransomware attack has occurred.

The price of bitcoin reducing from 2018 and the cost-benefit analysis for criminals might shift back. At the end, using file-encrypting virus or cryptomining malware is a business decision for attackers, says Steve Grobman, chief technology officer at McAfee. “As cryptocurrency prices drop, it’s natural to see a shift back [to ransomware].”

Should You Make The Payment?

If your computer has been attacked by a ransomware and you have lost all your important files and documents and you don’t even have an appropriate backup, the big question is, should you pay the ransom?

In general, law enforcement agencies deny you from making payment to the attackers. And the reason behind this is that it will only convince them to create more such viruses and cause more attacks for further revenues. A number of organizations that got attacked by a crypto-malware quickly stop thinking in terms the “greater good” and start doing a cost-benefit study, measuring the price of the ransom against the value of the locked data. According to research from Trend Micro, while 66 percent of companies don’t agree to make payment as a point of principle, in practice 65 percent actually do pay the ransom when they get attacked.

Ransomware attackers keep prices comparatively low- often between $200 and $1500, This is an amount firms can generally afford to pay on short notice. Some particularly sophisticated virus will detect the country where the compromised PC is running and adjust the ransom to match their nation’s economy. Crooks often demand less from companies in poor countries and more from companies in rich regions.

Hackers also offer discounts for making the payment within the given time as to persuade the victimized users to pay quickly before thinking too much about it. Commonly, the prize point is fixed so high enough to be worth the attackers’ while, but low enough that it’s often cheaper than what the affected person would have to pay to recover their files. With that in mind, some enterprises are starting to build the potential requirement to pay ransom into their safety plans: for example, some large UK companies who are not involved with cryptocurrency are holding some Bitcoin in reserve particularly for ransom payments.

Couple of things should be remembered here, people you are dealing with are cyber criminals. First, that threat that looks like a crypto-virus may not have encoded your file at all. These are called “scareware”. Make sure you are not dealing with such parasite before you make payment to anyone. And second, paying extortion to the criminals doesn’t guarantee that you will get your files back. Criminals often take the money and then disappear without provided the functional decryptor, they may have even not built any such decryption tool for the particular malware.

Ransomware examples

File-encrypting virus has generally been around since the ‘90s, however, it is mostly in use for the past five years or so, mainly because of the availability of untraceable payment methods like Bitcoin. Some of the most dangerous crypto-malware have been:

• WannaCry- It spreads autonomously from PC to PC using EternalBlue, an exploit crafted by NSA and then stolen by cyber criminals.
• Locky- Started propagating in 2016 and was “similar in its mode of attack to the precarious banking software Dridex.” One of variants of this threat, Osiris, was spread through phishing campaigns.
• GandCrab- It is one of the most lucrative ransomware ever. Its makers, who sold the program to cybercriminals, claim more than $2 billion in victim payouts as of July 2019.
• NotPetya- It is also employed as EnternalBlue and may have a part of a Russian-directed cyberattack against Ukraine.
• CryptoLocker- It was utilized for attack in 2013, launched the modern cryptovirus age and infected up to 500,000 systems at its height.
• RobbinHood- It is another EternalBlue variant that targeted the city of Baltimore, Maryland, in 2019.
• Thanos- This crypto-malware was discovered in January 2020. It is sold as ransomware as a service, It is the first to use the RIPlace method, which can evade most anti-ransomware techniques.
• SimpleLocker- It was the first broadly spread ransomware attack that focused on mobile devices.
• TeslaCrypt- It targeted gaming files and saw constant enhancement during its period of influence.