The No More Ransom Project
nomoreransom.org
nomoreransom.org
https://d1b10bmlvqabco.cloudfront.net/attach/is23h8nx8ff3jw/...
Short, blunt, helpful, clear. Pretty much what you'd like every memo you've ever gotten to be. Me, I'm a huge fan of ransom notes and Nigerian scam emails. We can learn a lot from them.
I'm pretty sure that when you get one of these that you're dealing with a script. You pay .65880 BTC into its wallet, period. There is no negotiation with a script. What I've also heard is that you can trust the script because these guys want a good reputation. If it gets out that you paid and you didn't get unlocked then no one would pay.
If you don't want to pay on the backend then you have to back up on the front end. You should do that already. You should be able to take a sledge hammer to your laptop, buy another and not miss a beat. If you could do that then you could just reformat and reinstall.
Prevention is worth it. Protection is worth it. Paying? Well if you did the first two you wouldn't be asking that question. But .65880 Bitcoin equals about 463.97 USD. So you might want to get on the prevention+protection train.
Prevention will help you against viruses, keyloggers, etc that can cause a lot more economic harm.
Protection, backing up, will also help you in the case of theft or dropping your MPB out of its sleeve when you get out the car. Done both.
I've interacted with ransomware scammers on several occasions. Each time I couldn't help but be impressed by their operations. In one case, the scammers provided an email address for customer support once the victim paid the ransom. They were courteous, helpful and professional - more so than many customer response teams I've had to interact with in legitimate companies.
To be clear, I also don't recommend paying the ransom, but the work is often impressive.
Nope, doesn't check out.
Think of criminals doing ransomware as if it was a small startup, for which profits are strongly dependent on reputation, and where your "customer support" is actually handled by the founders themselves. They have every reason to help, because it literally keeps their business model alive.
Now that I think about it: It would really damage the whole ransomware scheme if there were fake / rogue versions that won't decrypt, wouldn't it?
Or a single fake story about how ransom doesn't give your data back, published in a high-profile newspaper.
Come to think of it, our news sources write bigger lies every day, here they could actually do some good without any risk to their own reputation.
Unfortunately they are also cut throat with regard to each other. The first paper that does this risks the rest of them running stories about that source scare mongering and deliberately spreading panic on behalf of [insert conspiracy theory and/or unpopular agency here].
Sometimes the way they keep the dishonest guys in line is by attacking others who try to get in on the scheme. Traditionally this would be breaking people's knees, and I imagine well-organized cyber crime boils down to the same thing in the end.
> Sometimes the way they keep the dishonest guys in line is by attacking others who try to get in on the scheme.
Are you really trying to frame some extortionists/scammers as honest and some as dishonest? How about they all are criminals, extorting money as they do from random people, they don't care about?
Thus I think a scammer can be called dishonest.
That seems to be the problem, then. Call it a restricting context and we are back to the matters of good and evil.
Most of us in this thread ARE adequately prepared with backups, so it's easy to forget that yeah, someone should probably value their family memories over an infinitesimal effect on the scammer business by not paying. A lot of people here seem to suggest lying to or misleading people to believing they can't get their stuff back is a solution, while ignoring that it leaves people... unable to get their stuff back.
That's enough to hose 99% of users, even the ones following traditionally sufficient practices. You're only safe if you have offsite backups with drives that didn't mount to your computer recently.
Or if your backup solution is—from the perspective of the computer being backed up—an append-only store. Like a box of tapes, or Tarsnap using restricted keys, or Arq pointed at a versioned S3 bucket, or a NAS exposing an iSCSI target backed by an LVM thin pool LV with automatic daily snapshots.
Sadly, as far as I know, no turn-key hardware "home backup" or "home NAS" product is in that category, though.
On the other hand, if there were an off-the-shelf product for this, it would probably have unpatched security issues two weeks after you bought it, and if it were in common use you'd see ransomware targeting it. Tough problem to solve if you're not running and maintaining your own devices.
I suppose tarsnap or S3 would be the way to go, I'm just not that into cloud backups. Maybe it's time to get over that.
I'm waiting for the NAS "appliance" that's actually running CoreOS, and then just relies on running the :latest tag of some popular Docker image (and not a fork of it that they'll forget to update eventually; the original upstream image), plus a bit of config-file glue generated into a shared volume from a web-UI service running in another container. (Bonus points if the second container is only started up, for an hour at a time, when you press a button on the NAS, WPS-style.)
Such a design is essentially the same as shipping the device's OS as "firmware" with auto-updates, but for the fact that the vendor themselves isn't anywhere within the path of creating or distributing those updates. Which, in the end, makes all the difference.
Every time I say this, someone chimes in and says that in their office, they air gap tape drives and do all sorts of things with storage snapshots. If you're an enterprise - great. A large proportion of "two laptops" businesses have no backups at all, or a "I selectively place important things in Dropbox" setup. This team went and bought a NAS and setup backups. Good on them. It was sad to see cryptolocker take down both desktops, and all backups on the NAS.
The email he received sent him to a website with a convincing looking download, which came up 0/55 on virustotal. He even told me he wouldn't have run an executable - but it was a Word document. It can be truly depressing to see who cryptolocker affects sometimes.
Or doesn't mount to the source computer(s) at all.
My active machines push backups to intermediate locations, and the true backup locations pull from there and create snapshots. Status information used to verify the backup process is passed back the other way. The active machines don't (in fact can't) authenticate with the main backups and vice versa, reducing the likelihood that someone hacking into one can easily compromise the other at the same time.
I wouldn't expect the man on the street to muck around setting this up though, but many cloud backup solutions effectively do this if they don't have an easy "delete snapshot" API call or similar. I'm surprised that the "soft offline" backup side of it isn't marketed more actively. Maybe no one thinks they can adequately explain the benefit to the man on the street without putting them off by it being a little more complicated than a simple file copy.
No, they (usually) work similar to PGP/GPG, i.e. each file is encrypted with a different AES key and the AES key is encrypted with a public RSA key. The original AES key for a particular file is immediately deleted from memory after the file is encrypted and the private RSA key (needed for decrypting the AES key that is stored in the file) only ever gets delivered to the system if the ransom is paid.
Sounds like an easy way to get rid of ransomware. Just spread rumors that you didn't get your files back even though you paid.
Somehow I have a feeling that wouldn't work, though. Many people would still pay.
I'm extremely skeptical of the people that say ransomware is good for the economy or whatever. Broken window fallacy. Sure it creates an incentive to protect against hackers. But isn't that a bit circular? Hackers are good because they create inventive to protect against hackers? Ransomware is by far the most economically damaging kind (and personally damaging, for all the people that lose their family photos...)
Theres a lot of blame to go around for this situation. Shitty anti virus companies that sell a false sense of security and barely work. The broken security model of windows and most software. How inconvenient and expensive it is to actually do backups, so because of most basic human psychology most people put it off... If they are even technically minded enough to know they should, and most people aren't. Programs that pollute my home folder and documents with garbage that increases the space necessary to backup (OK that's just my personal issue.)
is it though, compared to malware ? Consider an elderly person who gets infected with malware/spyware, making his user experience frustrating and confusing. 2 or 3 trips to the Geek Squad for $150 a visit and you're at the same financial loss as paying a ransom. I'm sure there are also people who just dont use their computers due to infections.
Plus, malware has got to be much more prevalent, at least for a long time it was, not sure what the state of it is now. So in total, I would wager that many more dollars have been spent for techs to remove it than have been spent on ransomware.
It's pretty hard to say that users "should be safe from this" - most of the solid solutions discussed in this thread are probably used by <5% of people, and maybe much less than that.
For most I think that's the wrong target. Establishing & maintaining totally seamless, push-button rolling restore costs a lot of effort & money.
In the event of failure (which is not guaranteed), you burn a day or three getting things back to normal. So long as failures are rare, this can be cheaper (though availability suffers)
What bothers me about their advice is that it is only correct macroeconomically. For your particular case it could be the best solution to just pay - as even police departments have done before.
It also ignores that it is in cybercriminals' best interest to let you decrypt after you paid: They need their victims to trust them, and they have nothing to gain from keeping the files encrypted after payment.
Of course, the incentives themselves arise within immense cultural and technological contexts. Hopefully one day we see further past the dense fog of complexity. Assuming we aren't adding to it at a faster rate...
To twist it even further, note that the shifts of culture and technology are directed by aggregated incentives of people. What a nice and strong feedback loop there. Only shows how little control societies have over where they're going.
It could be the best solution for you to pay - if you don't care that you'll finance the attacks on other people and cause more harm overall.
So yes, from a purely egoistic perspective it makes sense.
The question you should ask is not "is it worth paying xxx for my data?", it's "is it worth paying xxx for my data and destroy the data of someone else?".
It isn't going to affect them much. But as anybody who runs a business knows, the difference between loss and profit generally hinges on a number of sensitive factors. Note, for example, that drug dealing pays so poorly that many drug dealers live with their moms:
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/apr/24/opinion/oe-dubner24
Refusing to pay on your own doesn't help other people much, but it still helps.
In case of ransomware, criminals are exploiting the very difficulty of victims to coordinate their actions. They depend on you paying instead of solving it yourself, educating others, or even simply calling the police. In other words, they profit directly off people's short-term, selfish thinking. The advice of defaulting to not paying is sound because if enough people follow it, the whole ransom stops being viable, which makes ransomware attacks stop coming.
The same, by the way, is the tried and true way of dealing with regular, meatspace, "I kidnapped your daughter" ransom cases.
The other option gives you an immediate, personal loss - "your files are gone" - together with an all but unobservable, mid- to longterm benefit for society.
You can of course hope for the majority to take the second option, but hope is the first step on the path to disappointment.
This already exists: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/07/posing-as-ransomware...
> "Once it executes it, it pops up a ransom message looking like any other ransomware," Earl Carter, security research engineer at Cisco Talos, told Ars. "But then what happens is it forces a reboot, and it just deletes all the files. It doesn't try to encrypt anything—it just deletes them all."
Bribing one policeman or a department, or a national level LE body, and so on?
Due to the nature of the internet and social media there is an ever decreasing chance of flying under the radar.
Even if a country's entire infrastructure is corrupt, you would still have to deal with a never ending list of 'beaks to wet'.
> Due to the nature of the internet and social media there is an ever decreasing chance of flying under the radar.
I disagree with this statement though. I think that Internet as it is now only makes it easier to fly under the radar - simply because people generate such a huge amount of noise that it's barely possible to handle. As long as you don't get too greedy, you can get away with a lot, simply because nobody is going to bother looking for you (hence e.g. spam).
If there's no police protection for the victims there's also little police protection for the criminal.
If I were a ransomware scammer I'd rather be caught and jailed than killed by irate victims or competing criminals.
Or that some criminal group/mafia would use it to try and 'sink' their rivals. After all, a gang in competition with whoever makes these malware programs would probably love to shut down their revenue from ransomware. With say, their rivals name attached to the cruel hoax.
Still, I suspect something like this will happen at one point.
Please don't do this. People (some would call them victims of cyber crime but not me) are EVIL and if they can trace it back to you, they will sue you. Doing this is not a good idea except as a thought experiment.
It is probably obvious to a lot of people but there are still good people out there who believe in the goodness of people so I thought I should spell it out.
"Hi there! Your computer has been infected with a virus which will encrypt one file on your computer at random each day. You can stop this, and decrypt all the files by paying X to bitcoin wallet Y. Don't wait too long, because if you wait too long, we might encrypt some system file and it won't boot any more."
and which did nothing else whatsoever
...then you'd probably actually get some income.
It'd be an interesting (if ethically awful) sociological experiment to find out exactly how much. Returning people's money afterwards, of course.
I can't quite use the word "literally" but I almost can so I'll do so anyway: if you pay a ransom, you are literally paying for your party to attack someone else. And you are actually literally (not metaphorically) funding their next attack.
Paying a ransom should be a criminal act that is twenty times worse than asking for one. It should be illegal for the exact same reason that possession of stolen goods is illegal.
On a microeconomic level it might make sense for you personally to buy stolen goods off the street: the existence of the laws making you a criminal if you do no longer makes this true.
Hyperbole does not a rational argument make.
Buying elephant tusks promotes the killing of elephants, regardless of where they came from because the demand you created supports a price in favor of bad actors as well.
You state that "if you drive a car you are literally contributing to global warming" which implies the policy statement "if it is illegal to drive a car, contribution to global warming decreases" and use this to imply it's not a rational argument to make it illegal to drive cars.
To your great surprise, I will now state that it is actually already illegal to drive cars, and it actually does have the exact effect that you say is not a rational conclusion:
http://www.dmv.org/articles/what-to-do-if-your-car-fails-an-...
Today, today, it is literally illegal to drive a car....which doesn't meet EPA standards! As a direct effect, people do not buy and drive cars which fail emissions standards.
So, yes, the exact policy suggestion that you don't go quite as far as to argue for actually is being enforced and actually demonstrably has the exact effect that you (only imply) doesn't happen.
Since you don't even imply any policy conclusions for the other two points I can't address them, I have no idea why you would mention them.
(If the government made it illegal to collect or pay taxes, obviously its tax base would evaporate overnight, this goes without saying, nobody would illegally pay money to the government out of civic duty despite its now being illegal to do so.)
Paying a ransom to get your own property back because it is yours is not even in the same ballpark.
The principle being that you are not (as) responsible for what you do under duress.
In a sense, paying a ransom is taking the law into your own hands -- rather than say to the FBI, "criminals have asked me for ransom" you are interacting with the criminals directly.
On a literal level you are literally transferring cold hard cash to them.
You make a good argument for why the policy suggestion I made is not a good idea, but I am not entirely convinced by it. As a rule it is not a good idea to engage in vigilante behavior.
Lawmakers and judges would have to use their discretion here and come up with quite nuanced laws.
>transferring cold hard cash to them
So? If I go to the 7-11 and buy a soda, and the cashier has been skimming the till, I am transferring cold hard cash to a thief.
The difference you keep skipping over is mens rea and I suggest you read up on it before you sound more foolish than you already are.
Regarding putting a cramp in your style - how about if a thief has stolen your phone with valuable something on it that isn't anywhere else, but you have an application that tells you where the phone is and you own a shotgun. Can you go and get your phone back by force if in your calculation it has a higher chance of actually solving your immediate problem, than involving the police? Why or why not? It's your phone. The thief knows what he did. The thief knows that it's yours.
I am not saying that there is no argument on your side of letting people take care of issues directly with criminals (whether by force or transferring ransoms), but there are important arguments on the other side as well. It's certainly not so clear-cut that you can start ending with petty insults (and please check your reply to be substantive if you reply to this.)
So what option does your average user have when confronted with a situation like this? They could call up the police and report it for statistics sake but the police aren't going to be able to fix the problem nor would they really care (unless you're the mayor or some prominent politician). The bad guy is probably not in the same country and there's no way to identify them anyway. Maybe you could figure out the hacking group but if you knew the actual identities then why aren't you working for Interpol already? Also maybe try using a site like in the link to check if the ransomware is compromised. But most likely, you just have to pay the ransom, get back your stuff, and learn an expensive lesson in how important regular backups, online and offline, can be.
You could just not pay it. The hacking group doesn't get their money but it's not like it cost much to run the attack in the first place. They will have someone's data out there that is much more valuable to the victim that will pay.
I compare this to leaving your bike unattended in a public place. Maybe you did a good job trying to lock it up but the thief hacksawed through your cheap lock. Or maybe you just left it unlocked. Either way, your bike is gone. Maybe buy a much stronger lock or two in the future. In this analogy, you aren't getting your bike back. You just have to spend the cash on a new one, expensive but hey, you need a bike to get to/do your job. You can report it stolen but unless there is some big bust and they find the guy, the thief is going to get away with it. Complaining that someone stole your bike isn't going to solve the issue. It sucks that the thief will profit off your loss but the data/bike is already gone. You aren't getting it back unless you drop the cash on a new bike/decryption key. The lesson is that you are going to either have to never ride a bike again (or use a computer, both unlikely) or you will have to use better security to prevent theft of your valuables.
Crime does pay, a lot. People get away with theft like this all the time and there's not much an individual can do except try harder in the future to defend themselves against theft in the future. Secure your computer better, run backups, don't do dumb stuff (like run unknown software or leave a bike unlocked).
>The ransomware is usually running from a script. There is no guy wearing a ski mask on the other end watching the wallet.
Yes, there is a guy (a bad guy) wearing a ski mask on the other end. If you do this, then you're the bad guy. Then you're a criminal. Not in some abstract way or an analogy, you're actually nearly literally a "bad guy wearing a ski mask" and the reason bad guys do this is to hide their identity while they commit crime, steps which you if you do this also take. It's very black and white.
> These groups aren't the same as a sketchy guy on the other side of town with your stolen laptop or phone, ready for the police to find him and recover your goods.
Yes they are.
> They could call up the police and report it for statistics sake but the police aren't going to be able to fix the problem nor would they really care (unless you're the mayor or some prominent politician). The bad guy is probably not in the same country and there's no way to identify them anyway. Maybe you could figure out the hacking group but if you knew the actual identities then why aren't you working for Interpol already? Also maybe try using a site like in the link to check if the ransomware is compromised. But most likely, you just have to pay the ransom, get back your stuff, and learn an expensive lesson in how important regular backups, online and offline, can be.
This is a very "wild west" mentality - 'there is no rule of law anyway!'. But that isn't quite right, is it? In point of fact the FBI actually does run a site where you can get ransomware keys recovered, it was covered here on HN.
Let's actually look at the wild west. What is the wild west today - California. Can a criminal just walk up to someone who is unarmed and go rob them, like in the 'wild west' days? Do people have to dual with each other and so forth?
No. While there was a period of unlaw (or at least films portray this) it gave way to the rule of law, which is normal and sane. (I could be completely wrong, I don't know any historical information about the wild west, I'm literally going on movies.) Californians walk around unarmed. it's not like in those movies, or in some kind of gang violence warzone.
I can't make extremely nuanced judgments and policy suggestions, I am just saying that you don't have to necessarily accept that there is "nothing that could be done." Laws exist for a reason. Moreover, it takes a high level of sophistication to write programs. If people are funding you to do that by simply meeting your request, you would start thinking of them like your clients (after all, they're paying you!!). If instead they turn you over to the FBI and Interpol, and write you an angry letter that you are a criminal gang member and wtf are you doing, are you really going to get up the next morning, crack open MSVC++ and think about creating your next crime?
I'm not saying this from the point of view of some trigger-happy district attorney. I'm telling you as one HN reader to another that they are way, way on the side of "bad guy in a ski mask", it's not even close to being a judgment call. No, nothing separates them from going down to their local financial district wherever they're located and and stealing someone's laptop. It's exactly the same.
> I compare this to leaving your bike unattended in a public place. Maybe you did a good job trying to lock it up but the thief hacksawed through your cheap lock. Or maybe you just left it unlocked.
First of all, I'd like to acknowledge that analogies including this one are incredibly useful in law when it comes time to make policy decisions, and sometimes can capture many real-world consequences. I don't want to sound like I have the answer to whether your way of thinking is correct or incorrect or what it is missing.
I would like you to consider a couple of effects: "crimes of opportunity" -- is there a difference (as someone else pointed out in this thread or another one) between leaving a laptop in the front seat of a car and locking it, and doing the same thing but throwing a coat over it? Clearly in terms of legal consequences there may not be much difference, if someone smashes open a car window and takes a laptop it's similar. But for the purposes of the analogy, you may want to consider "crimes of opportunity" in your thinking. My personal impression is that writing or using ransomware isn't nearly in the same boat - you don't accidentally use highly valuable programming skills to create ransomware; you don't accidentally take extremely sophisticated and detailed steps to hide from Interpol, the FBI, and others, and perform ransomware attacks, in a context in which most of the Internet is well agreed that governments are able to exercise certain deeply embedded back doors in many extraordinary cases -- what I mean is that the guy in the ski mask doesn't "happen to have" a ski mask on, they would have to take extraordinarily detailed steps to perform their crimes. It's a criminal thing.
>Crime does pay, a lot. People get away with theft like this all the time and there's not much an individual can do except try harder in the future to defend themselves against theft in the future. Secure your computer better, run backups, don't do dumb stuff (like run unknown software or leave a bike unlocked).
I don't understand why you don't also consider the role in law enforcement agencies and their actions. The Internet isn't exactly a lawless place. Law enforcement, which includes international cooperation among many governments (Interpol being one example of this), has sophisticated tools. These are undermined by any victims funding the crime.
I mentioned above the programmer firing up MSVC++ and writing their next ransomware project. Would you do it? Probably not.
But for many programmers, the calculus would change -- immensely -- if the question is, can a criminal get you to do for $80,000. If you divide that by 1,000 victims, that is just $80. So the question is, "Would you do it for $80,000, given moftz's world view that you're not some guy in a ski mask, and there's no international law anyway" OR "Would you do it for $80,000, given that many of your users will refer you to international law enforcement, and send you angry letters about the kind of criminal scum that you're acting as, and your country and others will stop you and you will have to defend yourself criminally. because you are a criminal."
That is a different equation entirely. If we accept the worldview you argued for, this creates the former, very dangerous and wild-west, and horrific scenario -- if we accept the latter scenario, few programmers would be motivated to act so unethically.
It's our choice as people of the world what kind of world we want to live in. Absent rule of law, "might makes right", but that's why there are laws everywhere and most people aren't affected by them, until they get into the kind of criminal behavior that we're discussing now.
It's a very clear line. It's not even close to requiring any interpretation.
The suggestion that people need to "protect their stuff" -- when as a matter of the state of the art this is actually pretty much literally impossible -- muddies of the issue.
They may be a 14 year old kid who ran some kit that somebody else made. If they collect $50 from 25 people, they will be stoked.
Or they may be a sophisticated criminal organization that want to built long term viability.
It's impossible to know which it is. But it is guaranteed that they are criminal and inherently untrustworthy. It is also guaranteed that any money you pay will finance the next wave of more sophisticated malware.
So, no, you cannot trust them to do good. You can trust them to do bad. Now, make your microeconimic choice.
That's because it's the correct advice. Ransom is a very old business, and experience throughout history shows you should never pay the danegeld[1].
> ignores that it is in cybercriminals' best interest to let you decrypt after you paid
That isn't being ignored. Paying the ransom is short-term thinking. Of course they will let you decrypt. By paying them you establish yourself as an easy/reliable mark that will probably pay again in the future. Paying would only make sense if you could somehow guarantee it was an isolated event.
[1] http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.html
Sure the criminals will release your files. Just like with regular, "meatspace" ransom, only a stupid criminal would not release hostages after having their demands met. It's in their best interest to do so. But if people by default don't give in to ransom threats, the whole business model becomes unviable for criminals.
So yeah, this advice is kind of like with vaccination and quarantines - it's not just about you. It's about all of us.
To a certain criminal any effort no matter how miniscule at all in actually providing a way to decrypt the files is useless, and I think with the reputation that's spread about ransomware we're at a point where more scammers will start to piggyback on reputation and stop following through
Criptostalker https://github.com/unixist/cryptostalker
Ransomwhere (macOS) https://objective-see.com/products/ransomwhere.html
Some theoretical information on this approach:
I told him that most of my clients pay 10x as much to learn how important backups are.
All data storage devices will fail. What will you do when yours does?
My old professor lost more than 2 years of work when one grad student in our had a car crash and his laptop was destroyed in the crash.
It's not the ideal thing for people here on HN, but it's pretty much the ideal thing to send to your non/semi-technical boss or stakeholder at your company who isn't taking ransomware seriously.
Assuming, of course, that the ransomware doesn't somehow spider out and compromise all your past backups as well. Let's assume your past backup versions are safe.
But if you are a concerned customer, why don't you just head over to their help pages and see what the features and limits regarding history and file deletion are?
For mass deletes that are cumbersome to recover using Dropbox's interface, that article mentions you can contact customer support to get assistance recovering from mass deletion events.
Turns out that me being annoyed means I now have a fully intact version of the data and nobody had to pay anything.
Can't this be built into the OS so I don't actually have to do it?
The hard part is figuring out how much communication to allow with the rest of the OS. Do you want to allow sites to set cookies? For every domain, or just for the target domain? If the latter, what happens with a cookie set after a redirect to a different domain? Do you want to allow downloads to reach the host OS?
The more secure you make things, the more usability suffers, so you have to think really hard about all such problems.
The developers either care too much about compatibility with legacy software or just don't want to invest into implementing more secure environment. Patching existing software seems to be much cheaper.
But desktop OSes don't do anything at all to protect the user. They allow the user to run a program by just clicking a link in email or web browser and this program has full access to all their data as does the PDF viewer or Java plugin in a browser. The desktop operating systems still use security models from mainframe era.
By having separate user's per app, apps can't read each others' files by default. If one app has a vulnerability that can be used to acquire root, that app can read all files after disabling SELinux.
To get root privileges you need to attack the kernel (or the application that has those privileges). Having a bug in an image viewer is not enough.
You can try to make obtaining root privileges more complicated only by reducing the attack surface with restricting system calls each application is allowed to make or with redesigning the kernel so that less code is executed in ring 0 (microkernel architecture).
But recent vulnerabilities like Dirty COW or rowhammer could work even in this case.
The patch to v8: http://lpaste.net/317342
An exploit: https://gist.github.com/sroettger/d077d3907999aaa0f89d11d956...
While this bug was artificial, there were (and can still be) bugs with similar consequences in actual engines (see https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1224... or https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=spidermonke... for historical examples).
While a bug in most of the components you mention are bad by themselves, their impact is magnified by the presence of javascript, which allows an attacker to interleave calculations and interactions with the buggy components, bypassing many mitigations.
Do you trust makers of security software?
Identifying good vendors and products is generally harder. I've heard good things about canary.tools and bromium, for example. Both explain what they do in terms that don't make a techie roll their eyes (too much at least): https://canary.tools/#how-it-works and https://www.bromium.com/advanced-endpoint-security/our-techn...
A good (but not exhaustive) test is to look at what the vendors promise. If they promise you full protection of your machine or network, you know they are full of shit. If they talk only about one aspect (identifying attackers, reducing the attack surface on a browser), things start to look better.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/31/trend_micro_patches_...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3020327/antivirus-software-co...
I don't trust them to make good quality software which works quietly and efficiently in my interest.
They basically sell a security theatre product where their motivations are to popup "PROTECTED BY ____" at all times so I don't forget it exists, and to look busy - typically by scanning the same files over and over even though they haven't changed in months - and to hook into everything to add more sales buzzwords to their product.
But in the context of ransomware, the advice presented here is game-theoretically sound (and proven by thousands of years of experience in dealing with criminals demanding ransom), so I do trust it.
I imagine the Bitcoin community would be pretty resistant to attempts to establish something like that, since a lot of the bitcoin ethos is based in distrust for centralized authorities.
Incidentally, this is (or used to be) the trial period for a copy of Windows.
Generally I find the data I care about is k in size, the terabytes I seem to accumulate are mostly garbage.
Given how large the size of drives of today are, and how small the data that means anything to any of us remains, the size of storage space and the almost effortless ability to replicate are the primary indication of ransomwares general irrelevance.
Edit: this may be similar economically to the Nigerian prices' aversion to English class.
I also use uBlock Origin, but I don't disable javascript for any websites.
If this happened to me, I think I'd just buy a new SSD and restore from backup.
Seems overblown.
And the "good" versions of these do things like encrypt or outright delete things like time machine before encrypting the rest.
https://blog.malwarebytes.com/cybercrime/2016/03/first-mac-r...
That's good to know, but the ransomware criminals probably have the skills, and they definitely have the incentive, to pwn that site.
And the ransomware that can be decrypted with this site is because of the author's incompetence. It's not hard to write secure ransomware, but they somehow failed very badly. Anyone should be able to easily protect this site.
Ransomware exists thanks to a fundamental mistake in the Unix (+Windows, +others) model that a process' rights to the filesystem automatically inherit from the user's rights. Imagine if all processes running under the same user shared the same address space!
There is absolutely no reason some random piece of code downloaded from the internet should have access to my home directory, let alone the rest of the filesystem, without my explicit authorization.
The future is macOS sandbox / linux cgroup by default for all processes.
The macOS solution of presenting the user a system-controlled open dialog that then grants access to the selected path outside the container is elegant and not too intrusive.
Taken a step further, it is obvious that CoW filesystems need to be standard and all activity taken by a process should be recorded in snapshots that get coalesced over time. If a rogue process does cause damage it should be possible to roll back just that process' most recent changes to the filesystem.
With dynamic prompts akin to the firewall prompts familiar from Windows/Mac.
'The program "Chrome" wants to create the file "/home/username/.config/chrome/config". Allow "Chrome" to access [just this file / the diretory ~/.config/chrome / the diretory /home/username]'
'WARNING: The program "totally_legit_for_reals" wants to overwrite the file ~/.xinitrc. This is potentially dangerous. Allow access? -> Are you sure?'
'ALERT: the unknown program "xxx" has gained superuser privileges and wants to overwrite a critical system file System32/whatever.dll. This is very dangerous....'
Then again, non techie users usually ignore all those prompts and just click accept.
Just look at the mess that is Android permissions. Almost no one actually checks them or rejects apps that ask for way too much.
I'd still really like a kernel level protection mechanism that requires granting each executable the capabilities it requests, with dynamic pin the Linux world there are SELinux, AppArmor grsecurity, which are often cumbersome to use).
I think there are a number of implementations of such things, but none mainstream enough.
Hell, I'm a technical user and after a couple of days running Comodo firewall (which does prompt in a similar way to your examples) I turned it off because I was sick of the prompts and just wanted to use my machine.
I recall that's how it worked under windows 95/98 (and the older OS).
However, everything up to, but not including, Windows 2000 (and its predecessor Windows NT) suffers from ALL local users having effectively admin rights on the machines. Not only that the OS doesn't support user permissions, also the underlying file system FAT32 does not store UID/GID or anything, except the file flags "read only"/"system"/"hidden".
Only Windows NT and above (2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10) are secured in this way. Caveat: NT, 2k and XP allowed installations on FAT32, which nullified many protections.
Maybe try lynx?
Or just use VPS when surfing the web.
I used to do this on linux, as I had copies of my windows VM and I would just browse from the windows box on another screen and then work from the linux one on the main screen
Not to mention the fact that using Lynx makes you unique enough for it to be a useful tracking indicator.
Because ransomware criminals would probably love to take over that site and start distributing ransomware or other malware from it. And I have no way to judge how well that site's owners have protected it from that sort of attack. When I'm in doubt, I tend to err on the side of caution.
I assume most people reading the website would be those already infected.
The criminals are more likely to take over any other high traffic website and infect computers of clueless people who have never heard of ransomware.