Varied Angles of Attack
The margin of safety against ransomware, not big to begin with, is steadily getting smaller.
While commonly spread by infected links or attachments in email, ransomware can now also propagate via “injecting ads on specific websites,” explains Alexander Vukcevic, Avira Virus Labs Director. “[The user] doesn’t necessarily have to click on the ad; just seeing it can turn him into a ransomware victim.”
Apple users – formerly secure in their belief that their OS was impregnable to malware mischief – had the smiles wiped off their faces last week when researchers at Palo Alto Networks discovered the “KeRanger” ransomware that infected Macs using a compromised file-sharing app.
And an ongoing surge of ransomware-infected emails has experts warning us against “Locky”, which encrypts compromised systems until the victims can pay three bitcoins (about $1,260). As of March 9, Trustwave Spiderlabs found a total of “around 4 million malware spams [circulating] in the last seven days, and the malware category as a whole accounted for 18% of total spam arriving at our spam traps.”
