Dating back to the 1980s, ransomware is a form of malware used by cybercriminals to lock files on a person's computer and demand payment to unlock them.
The technology — which officially turned 35 on Dec. 12 — has come a long way, with criminals now able to spin up ransomware much faster and deploy it across multiple targets.Jeju Air crash that killed 179 prompts South Korea to probe country's airline operation system It would then display a ransom note requesting a cashier's check to be sent to an address in Panama for a license to restore the files and directories."It was the first ransomware and it came from someone's imagination. It wasn't something that they'd read about or that had been researched," Martin Lee, EMEA lead for Talos, the cyber threat intelligence division of IT equipment giant Cisco, told CNBC in an interview.
Once opened, the attachment downloaded and installed malware on the victim's computer, scanning the file system and encrypting files and demanding payment via wire transfer.In 2013, only a few years after the creation of bitcoin, the CryptoLocker ransomware emerged. CryptoLocker also became notorious in the cybersecurity community as one of the earliest examples of a"ransomware-as-a-service" operation — that is, a ransomware service sold by developers to more novice hackers for a fee to allow them to carry out attacks.
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