INTRODUCTION:
Government officers are the recent targets of Ransomware. Recently, the police department of Illinois has been hacked by the popular ransomware attack termed as “Cryptoware”. The malware immediately encrypted all the police reports like witness statements, crime-scene photos, post-mortem reports and records of traffic tickets. Overall, hackers succeeded in blocking access to 72,000 files from police.
The ransomware attack on police department was in January. Spear phishing was used to send malware into police department. The main goal of the ransomware is to block access to the user, infect the system and demand a ransom to unblock the user’s data. In this incident, the police department is forced to pay $600 dollars in bitcoins
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When someone in the police department opened that email, resulted in downloading a malware to his computer. The malware known as cryptoware inserts a registry key in the computer and gives access to execute commands and immediately encrypts all the files on the computer and displays a message to pay a ransom in order to decrypt all the police records.
Many researchers have suggested the officials to routinely back up their data into external drive as in this incident the police department was forced to pay as attempting to find the attacker would be risky since the backup was also infected along with the other files so only option for the police officials left was to pay the ransom and get all the police records decrypted.
The hacker insisted the police department to pay the ransom in bitcoins since it completely anonymize the transaction. Bitcoins is a cryptocurrency which is a peer to peer technology in which transactions are verified by the network nodes but the transactions are stored as only addresses; not as identity. Thus this helps hacker use bitcoins anonymously. However some security researchers are trying to find the most transaction linked to the known users by constructing a network