Disorderly conduct: localized malware impersonates the police

[Jack]

We have recently seen the emergence of several samples of a ransomware family localized into different languages. Malware that relies on localized social engineering tactics has been around for a few years, as we discussed in our two-part series on Program:Win32/Pameseg, and as evident in the surge of password stealers targeting Brazilian online banking websites. Ransomware, which renders a computer unusable and then demands payment, supposedly to make it usable again, has existed for quite some time as well.

What is remarkable in the cases of ransomware we've seen lately is the effort that the authors have put into creating different versions for every targeted country. We've so far seen variants localized into four languages: English, Spanish, German, and Dutch. The list of imitated institutions is also quite long. It includes:

1. The German Federal Police
2. GEMA (Germany's performance rights organization)
3. The Swiss "Federal Department of Justice and Police"
4. The UK "Metropolitan Police"
5. The Spanish Police
6. The Dutch Police

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[Jack]

The past few days I have seen on MDL and other similar sites a lot of these ransomware programs, they are becoming very popular and asking more and more money ....Seen one today that was asking 100$ (apart from what they would get from 'phishing' you), as Microsoft said they use drive-by and exploits on Adobe and Java to infect a system...

The ransomware mentioned by Microsoft it;s not hard to remove but there are a few samples out there which cause a nightmare when removing them due to the strong encryption....

 

[McLovin]

Whoa, pretty scary that billions of people fall for it and when they do imagine how much money will have to be paid back.