Don’t Fall Victim to ZEPTO, the Latest Ransom-Ware Virus!
Have you been lucky enough to have avoided the recent onslaught of the ‘Locky’ ransom-ware virus?
Are you one of the many businesses that have had their files encrypted, encountering the expense of down-time and data retrieval?
Or worse again, fell victim to the virus with no reliable back-up system in place, learning the valuable, and possibly very expensive lesson.
Zepto is the latest ransom-ware virus to attack, with similar consequences in that your files end up scrambled and that a message will appear on your screen telling you how much you need to pay to unscramble the files, in essence another disruptive, expensive click on an unsafe email!
Zepto appears to be circulated in emails with an attached ZIP file or DOCM file, both commonly used methods by ransom-ware criminals.
Your data files are both scrambled and renamed, so that encrypted files end up with names that look like this:
- FA3D5195-3FE9-1DBC-E35E-89380D21F515.zepto
- FA3D5195-3FE9-1DBC-7E8D-D6F39B86044A.zepto
- FA3D5195-3FE9-1DBC-1683-7BF4FD77911D.zepto
- FA3D5195-3FE9-1DBC-30B9-E2FF891CDB11.zepto
The first half of each name is the same for every file, and is a unique identifier that tells the crooks who you are if you decide to pay up to get your data back.
After your files are scrambled, Zepto presents a “how to pay” message, to make very sure you know that you can recover your data for a fee.
The message appears in three different ways: as your desktop wallpaper; in an image that’s opened up in the Windows Photo Viewer; and as an HTML page that’s saved into every directory where files have been scrambled… Read more of this Naked Security article here