New Trojan virus threatens internet users

Being careless on the Internet and getting infected by a computer Trojan can be very expensive these days. A new breed of Trojan called "ransom-ware" is now making the rounds of the Internet, encrypting files of an infected computer and demanding $300 to have the files unlocked. "Your computer catched (sic) our software while browsing illigal (sic) porn pages, all your documents, text files, databases was archived with long enought (sic) password. You can not guess the password for your archived files – password lenght (sic) is more then 10 symbols that makes all password recovery programs fail to bruteforce it (guess password by trying all possible combinations)," security firm Lurhq Threat Intelligence Group quoted a text file titled AUTO_ZIP_REPORT.TXT that the Trojan leaves behind as saying. It also warned the computer user that reporting the case to the police will not help because the police "do not know (the) password." Lurhq has dubbed the new Trojan as "Cryzip," the second such Trojan to emerge in the last 10 months after PGPcoder Trojan. The first such Trojan, however, emerged way back in 1989. The "Cryzip" Trojan will search for files, such as source code or database files, on infected systems, then uses a commercial zip library to store the encrypted files. Besides the "instructions" for getting the files back, the text file left behind by "Cryzip" also contains the "E-Gold" account number of the extorting party. The instructions tell the user to open an E-Gold account that will be used to pay the Trojan's author. Once the payment is made, a link will be sent to the victim to unlock the files. "If you really care about documents and information in encrypted files you can pay using electonic (sic) currency $300. Reporting to police about a case will not help you, they do not know password. Reporting somewhere about our e-gold account will not help you to restore files. This is your only way to get yours files back," it said. Lurhq said that while there have been few reported incidents, this new Trojan indicates "the possible start of a trend of this type of malware, and future incidents may affect a wider swath of users." But it said that in most cases, simply having and using proper backup software would mitigate the risk from "ransom-ware."-GMANews.TV