Cryptolocker Ransomware is the deadliest PC Threat Ever

By Prarthito

| Published: Wednesday, March 12, 2014, 15:19 [IST]

Did you ever think about seeing a day when you would have to pay up heftily to access all the files and folders stored on your PC? We are guessing not. However, scarily enough, it seems like that day is already here with a new trojanware detected that forces its victims to do the same.

Dubbed Cryptolocker, it is the newest ransomware trojan to have hit a number of PCs all across the world, and has already been tagged as a potent threat to PCs around the world.

Cryptolocker Ransomware is the deadliest PC Threat Ever

This malicious malware, called CryptoLocker, has now become the scariest threat to PC's around the world. Basically a ransomware by its application and use, CryptoLocker has raked in around 5 million dollars in the last 4 months of 2013. And this is the sum of money that earlier took nearly a year for cyber attackers to acquire.

Johannes B. Ullrich, chief research officer at the SANS Institute stated that "A compromised personal computer for a botnet or Distributed Denial of Service attack is worth about a buck to a byte bandit." He also added that cyber-criminals can easily make 100 dollars and more with the ransomware.

Garth Bruen, with the Digital Citizens Alliance, a consumer safety group focused on online crime, stated that the people selling the software are the same people who infected the machine in the first place, and this later came to be known as 'scareware.'

At the moment, the new trojanware threat is said to be the result of an evolutionary process, leading back to the unprincipled anti-virus campaigns during the 2000s, which used pop-up windows for alerting users that their computers were infected.