A new ransomware attack called as the Bad Rabbit has become so viral throughout Europe as it has reportedly affected over 200 major organizations. These organizations include Russian, German, Ukrainian and Turkish based firms.
This ransomware has the capability of locking down user systems and then demanding 0.05 worth of bitcoin to unlock the affected system. This amounts to nearly 285 US Dollars. After an investigation made by Kaspersky Labs, they made the following statement:
“No exploits were used, so the victim would have to manually execute the malware dropper, which pretends to be an Adobe Flash installer. We’ve detected a number of compromised websites, all of which were news or media websites.”
This is what Kaspersky believes that no ingenuity was used for this widespread new ransomware attack but researchers at ESET believe something else. They believe that this new ransomware attack was a variant of the famous Petya ransomware.
They also claim that Bad Rabbit uses an open source drive encryption software to lock down systems using RSA 2048 encryption keys. The ransomware opens a window on the affected system displaying the following message:
“Time left before the price of decryption goes up”
Now the big question is: How to protect ourselves from this viral ransomware?
Meanwhile the researchers are finding ways to decrypt the system without paying the required amount demanded by the new ransomware attack, Kaspersky has claimed that disabling WMI service prevents the malware to spread over your network.
Moreover, avoid downloading any third party applications and carefully and thoroughly read the reviews of the application you are downloading from multiple sources.
Last but not the least, make several backup copies of your data to keep your data secure.
