Most were epic fails and could hardly even be called cryptoviruses. They were largely isolated attempts by individuals and most fell apart at the seams because the people behind them only had a passing knowledge of cryptography.Ĭryptolocker main window, with its countdown timer. Until Cryptolocker, other criminals had tried in vain to produce a virus that could hold your files hostage until money exchanged hands. But on the other hand, if we'd paid more attention to these two brilliant researchers in the first place, we might have been better placed to have stopped or at least limited the damage Cryptolocker and similar ransomware has done and will undoubtedly inflict in the near future. We were spared from falling victim to this scam for a while. But Cryptolocker is the first example of the technique working on a large scale and for a sustained period of time.įrom the brightest brains to your desktopĬredit where credit is due: Cryptolocker is the work of one or more criminals, who are probably netting tens or hundreds of millions in ransoms, but the original concept was fully developed in the mid 1990s by Moti Yung, a cryptography researcher at Columbia University who now works for Google, and his PhD student at the time, Adam Young.įortunately, criminals aren't known for their love of academic papers so the cryptovirus proposed by Yung and Young went largely unnoticed outside the academic community for nearly 20 years. I've taught cryptoviruses for more than 10 years in my lectures, and others have been aware of the threat for nearly 20 years. You can take some simple steps to protect yourself, but this threat is going to grow globally for some time.įar from being a surprise, the arrival of Cryptolocker was easy to predict. Criminals have been trying to make cryptoviruses of this kind work effectively for decades, but only now have they got it right.
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