Sentences with phrase «payment by ransomware»

Recently, reports surfaced that, for the first time, Bcash is being accepted as a form of ransom payment by ransomware — intrusive software, which encrypts victims files and demands payment in return.

Not exact matches

«Ransomware operators ultimately direct bitcoin to a central account that they cash out periodically, and by injecting a little bit of our own money into the larger flow we could identify those central accounts, see the other payments flowing in, and begin to understand the number of victims and the amount of money being collected,» McCoy said.

Key findings include the discovery that South Koreans are disproportionately impacted by ransomware campaigns, with analysis revealing that $ 2.5 million of the $ 16 million in ransomware payments tracked by the researchers was paid in South Korea.

Ken Corish, online safety director at the education tech charity, South West Grid for Learning, said «more and more schools» had been hit by ransomware viruses that encrypted sensitive data before the hackers demanded payment to get it back.

This was highlighted when a school in Los Angeles was forced to make a ransomware payment of $ 28,000 after criminals had compromised its computer network by infecting IT services, email and other collaborative tools.

The use of ransomware in North America has grown exponentially, becoming a popular tool for kidnapping data by encrypting the victim's data and demanding payment for the encryption key.

In the case of bitcoin, it's by far the biggest with a market cap of around $ 11 billion, but its core use case is still for sketchy stuff, such as ransomware payments or buying drugs on the Internet.

By comparison last month a South Korean Web hosting firm reportedly paid the equivalent of US$ 1 million in ransomware, believed to be the biggest publicly reported payment so far in the world.

As reports emerge, today's attack paints a picture of businesses and governments around the world held hostage by a second major wave of ransomware, a kind of software that hijacks computerized systems and demands payment, often in bitcoin, to unlock them.

Some of the victims seemed to be paying up, with two of the Bitcoin wallets — here and here — specified as recipients by the ransomware screens reporting 16 payments today totaling about $ 4,675.

Once the payment is done, ransomware is removed by supplying a program that can decrypt the files, or by sending an unlock code that undoes the payload's changes.

In May, a ransomware called WannaCry shocked the world by holding Microsoft computers hostage using an operating system exploit, encrypting the files on infected computers and demanding a $ 300 payment in bitcoin for their release.

Bitcoin payments made by victims of the WannaCry ransomware attack — which totaled 52.2 BTC — were withdrawn from online wallets overnight.