Tag Archives: OphionLocker
New, dangerous ransomware appears in the wild
In class we talked briefly about ‘Ransomware,’ software that compresses / encrypts / locks up your files, then demands payment for the password or key or whatever to get your files back. We also discussed that the amounts of money demanded are never too much to prevent someone from actually paying – if they asked for a million dollars no one would pay it, and the encryption was normally breakable if you knew what you were doing.
Now, in an event that involves many of the topics we discussed in our last class, a scary new ransomware attack is changing all that. Known as OphionLocker (this article shows it may not be as sophisticated as everyone is saying, possibly breakable through a C++ IDE ), it uses what is known as elliptic curve cryptography, a practically unbreakable form of encoding, to hold files hostage, and it is delivered through malicious ads displayed on web pages.
