07:20 08.07.2020Ransomware attack: From the breach to the ransom demand
The bitcoin price has surged over recent months as interest surrounding social media giant Facebook’s planned libra project reached fever-pitch but has swung wildly as global regulators poured cold water on Facebook’s ambitions.
Libra’s mission is to enable a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people.
The distributed database created by blockchain technology has a fundamentally different digital backbone. This is also the most distinct and important feature of blockchain technology.
In traditional fiat money systems, governments simply print more money when they need to. But in bitcoin, money isn’t printed at all – it is discovered. Computers around the world ‘mine’ for coins by competing with each other.
At its most basic, a fork is what happens when a blockchain diverges into two potential paths forward — either with regard to a network’s transaction history or a new rule in deciding what makes a transaction valid.
Bitcoin is built on a blockchain system. This means that transactions using Bitcoin are processed by being placed in blocks and then added to the chain. Each block contains just 1MB of information, which limits the amount of transactions that can be placed on each block.
Samsung’s new ‘upcycling’ initiative has seen the company repurpose outdated technology for novel and creative utilities, including the construction of a bitcoin mining rig from out of old smartphones.
In a camera-ready twist, the demand for ransom actually did come in the form of an analog note. Users were instructed to turn on their printers, which promptly spat out a demand for a “licensing fee” of $189 to be paid …
Petya is a type of ransomware that appeared in early 2016 and returned to a trick first seen in the early 1990s, whereby criminals do not encrypt all the files on your computer but instead they attack a part of the operating system called the Master File Table (MFT).
From the looks of images being posted across social media, the ransomware note is in English and demanding $300 in Bitcoin, similar to the WannaCry ransom.
