Official Discord for 1stAmender - Click to Join Us!

WCry ransomware worm’s Bitcoin take tops $70k as its spread continues

current events


Tags: Web  

current events

WCry ransomware worm’s Bitcoin take tops $70k as its spread continues published by nherting
Writer Rating: 0
Posted on 2017-05-17
Writer Description: current events
This writer has written 195 articles.


WCry, the National Security Agency exploit-powered ransomware worm that began spreading worldwide on Friday, had reportedly affected hundreds of thousands of computers before the weekend, but the malware had only brought in about $20,000 in ransom payments. However, as the world returned to the office on Monday, those payments have been rapidly mounting, based on tracking data for the three Bitcoin wallets tied by researchers to the malware. As of noon Eastern Time on Monday, payments had reached an estimated $71,000 since May 12. So far, 263 payments have been made to the three wallets linked to the code in the malware.

The payment history for each wallet shows individual transactions ranging mostly between 0.16 and 0.34 Bitcoin (approximately $300 and $600, respectively), with the number of larger payments increasing over time. Different ransom amounts have been presented to victims, and the price of Bitcoin has climbed dramatically over the past week, causing some variation in the payment sizes.

According to researchers at Symantec Security Response, tracking ransom transactions would have been much more difficult if not for a bug in code that was supposed to create an individual bitcoin wallet for each victim:

Because the code failed, it defaulted over the three preset wallets. This, along with the "killswitch" code that was left in the initial wave of WCry malware, may be an indication that the malware wasn't yet fully tested when it was launched.

   

Sources:
https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/05/wcry-ransomware-worms-bitcoin-take-tops-70k-as-its-spread-continues/

Article Rating: 0.0000



You have the right to stay anonymous in your comments, share at your own discretion.

Anonymous: 2021-09-23 11:06:47 ID:5272

Hi I'm so happy I found your Web-site, I really uncovered you by mistake, even though I was on the lookout on Bing for something else, Nonetheless I am below now and would just like to convey many thanks a lot for a great submit as well as a all spherical thrilling blog site (I also really like the theme/design), I don’t have enough time to appear about it all in the meanwhile but I've saved it as well as additional your RSS feeds, so After i have enough time I are going to be back to browse a good deal additional, Be sure to do keep up the excellent work.