Ransomware have proven to be a good source of money for cybercriminals. Not surprisingly, we are nowadays facing various families of this type of malware, i.e Cryptowall, CTB-Locker,Teslacrypt to name a few.
Recently, one more joined this set: Chimera, that is distributed via targeted e-mails to small companies.
At the first sight, it appears like yet another malware encrypting user’s private files and demanding ransom for decrypting it. But it added to this feature one more twist that is supposed to put more pressure on the victim. It threatens that in case if the ransom will not be paid, all the stolen files are going to be published, along with the stolen credentials allowing to identify files’ owner*.
This blackmail technique, called doxing provides much more serious threat than just loosing access to files. Also, keeping backups, that helps to manage attack of a normal ransomware would not help much. I think it will be fair to make a new term to describe this new subtype of ransomware, for example: doxingware.
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