Some victims who refused to pay the ransom incurred significant losses recovering control of their files and restoring files from backups, if they had them. "In any case, Cryptolocker has been very successful," acknowledged Jarvis. Jarvis countered, saying that that research was flawed. Among the court documents filed Monday against the makers of Gameover Zeus and Cryptolocker, one cited an estimate of $27 million paid by victims in a two-month stretch of 2013. Others have pegged the profit considerably higher. Jarvis said that SecureWorks - which has been in the forefront of analyzing Cryptolocker, and was one of the private security firms that assisted law enforcement prior to this week's take-down - estimated the Cryptolocker haul at a minimum of $10 million since its debut. The crimeware has been in active circulation since at least 2005, with traces harking back as far as 1989.Ĭryptolocker has been the most successful so far in extorting money from victims. "Ransomware" is the term for extortion malware that, once installed on a hijacked Windows PC, encrypts files and then tries to convince users to pay to decrypt them so they can again be opened.
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