Number: IRCNE2013122047
Date: 2013/12/20
According to “techworld”,
the feared Cryptolocker ransom Trojan has infected at least a quarter of a million PCs worldwide, a success rate probably generating somewhere in the low millions of dollars in ransom payments, a new analysis by Dell SecureWorks has estimated.
Offering some of the first data, Dell SecureWorks recorded 31,866 infected PCs contacting sinkholed command and control servers between 22 October and 1 November alone, over 22,000 of which were in the US with around 1,700 in the UK.
Carrying out the same exercise between 9 and 16 December, the number of infected PCs had fallen to only 6,459, a fall attributed mainly to a lower level of activity by the botnets pushing the malware.
From these numbers, the firm calculated that in the first 100 days of its activity from mid-September, Cryptolocker managed to infect between 200,000 and 250,000 PCs globally, disproportionately in English-speaking countries.
Many of the victims of Cryptolocker’s shakedown have been small businesses rather than consumers; from its first appearance the malware targeted SMEs using subject lines such as ‘consumer complaint’ to engineer employees into opening attachments, the firm said.
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