Malware News Crypt0L0cker Ransomware is Back with Campaigns Targeting Europe

[Solarquest]

The Crypt0L0cker ransomware, otherwise known as Torrentlocker or Teerac, was a common ransomware infection that mostly targeted Australia and European countries in 2014. Towards the middle of 2015, though, this ransomware slowly started dying off to the point that it was hardly distributed anymore.

Fast forward to the beginning of February 2017 where we are now seeing Crypt0L0cker making a strong come back and targeting European countries once again.

Crypt0L0cker Campaigns Targeting European Countries
Over the past few days, I have been receiving a lot of requests for help in decrypting files encrypted by Crypt0L0cker. To see if there was a resurgence in activity, I checked the ID-Ransomware site and saw that towards the end of January Crypt0L0cker went from a small amount of submissions to the their site a day, to close to a 100. Then in February things started picking up even more with some days having over 400 submissions related to Crypt0L0cker.

More info in the link above

 

[_CyberGhosT_]

Yeah, I remember the comments on how it was dying, but what I have noticed is
for most of the ones that gain a medium amount of traction they are kept alive
but may go dormant for a re-config or tweaking, only to reappear slightly better
than before.
I think this is due to the limited "new avenues" Ransomware authors have available to them,
a mantality of "If it works, it's worth keeping" so they may have stages of upgrades or fixes
to improve flaws rather than ditching the code altogether.
I hope that made sense.
Cool share Solar

 

[Winter Soldier]

"Sometimes they come back" just quoting a good book from S. King.

But often, this is done by increasing malicious capabilities like using the PEC email system to fool the user.
Social engineering techniques are more and more sophisticated, and if the security system doesn't work, our instinct is not always able to save us.