- Aug 14, 2015
- 113
In the new season of Mr. Robot, the critically acclaimed TV show featuring a team of hackers led by a paranoid, psychotic antihero, the hacking group uses ransomware to lock the evil corporation they’re fighting out of their computers and force them to pay up.
As for all its hacking plot points, ransomware is a real thing, a growing, seemingly unstoppable epidemic that’s hitting everyone from random computer users to large hospitals, making criminals a whopping $209 million in this year’s first three months alone. Now, after reality spilling onto Mr. Robot, the TV show is spilling into reality: someone created a real piece of ransomware and called it FSociety, even using the fictitious hacktivist group’s iconic logo.
The ransomware hasn’t infected anyone yet, but whoever created it uploaded it to Virus Total, a free online malware repository, presumably to see if antivirus would detect it as a malicious file. The malware was first spotted by Michael Gillespie, a "security researcher for MalwareHunterTeam.
Michael Gillespie August 18, 2016
“It's the first we've ever seen. I'm never seen the show, so I don't know if anything else had a subtle hint. At first I didn't understand why everyone else on the team got super excited when I shared the wallpaper, lol,” Gillespie told Motherboard in an online chat.
The antivirus company Avira published a blog post about it on Wednesday, trying to speculate as to the origins of the malware. The two possibilities, according to Avira’s Oscar Anduiza, are that this is a real ransomware variant still in development, or that it’s actually a viral marketing ploy from the Mr. Robot team.
We reached out to someone within the Mr. Robot team to see if they can confirm or deny, and we’ll update the post when and if we hear back.
It’s hard to tell at this point which one of these theories is true. But one thing is for sure, you know Mr. Robot is popular with hackers when they decide to tribute it creating real-life malware inspired by the show.
“It was bound to happen,” Yonathan Klijnsma, a security researcher for Fox-IT, told me.
Easter egg from episode 1 about the ransomware: YOUR PERSONAL FILES ARE ENCRYPTED
(For any HTML coders out there, there is actually a hidden message within the script of the timer countdown)
As for all its hacking plot points, ransomware is a real thing, a growing, seemingly unstoppable epidemic that’s hitting everyone from random computer users to large hospitals, making criminals a whopping $209 million in this year’s first three months alone. Now, after reality spilling onto Mr. Robot, the TV show is spilling into reality: someone created a real piece of ransomware and called it FSociety, even using the fictitious hacktivist group’s iconic logo.
The ransomware hasn’t infected anyone yet, but whoever created it uploaded it to Virus Total, a free online malware repository, presumably to see if antivirus would detect it as a malicious file. The malware was first spotted by Michael Gillespie, a "security researcher for MalwareHunterTeam.
Michael Gillespie August 18, 2016
“It's the first we've ever seen. I'm never seen the show, so I don't know if anything else had a subtle hint. At first I didn't understand why everyone else on the team got super excited when I shared the wallpaper, lol,” Gillespie told Motherboard in an online chat.
The antivirus company Avira published a blog post about it on Wednesday, trying to speculate as to the origins of the malware. The two possibilities, according to Avira’s Oscar Anduiza, are that this is a real ransomware variant still in development, or that it’s actually a viral marketing ploy from the Mr. Robot team.
We reached out to someone within the Mr. Robot team to see if they can confirm or deny, and we’ll update the post when and if we hear back.
It’s hard to tell at this point which one of these theories is true. But one thing is for sure, you know Mr. Robot is popular with hackers when they decide to tribute it creating real-life malware inspired by the show.
“It was bound to happen,” Yonathan Klijnsma, a security researcher for Fox-IT, told me.
Easter egg from episode 1 about the ransomware: YOUR PERSONAL FILES ARE ENCRYPTED
(For any HTML coders out there, there is actually a hidden message within the script of the timer countdown)
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