Topic: What about bitcoin and ransom (Read 1774 times)

like some of stated before its super cheap to get a back up tb or 2 and just back up anything sensitive so if this happens you just wipe it.  Luckily the computers I have had issues on I didnt have anything important on. I basically have my porn laptop that is only for sketchy use like porn or downloading movies lol. I then have another computer I do absolutely nothing on but safe activity/work.

So do you wish to pay ransom amount if your PC is hacked? I've seen people saving their passwords in Gmail and then their email account gets hacked and they lose all their information. They are again so naive.

You know why Symantec / Norton always tells people to delete Windows restore points as step one since the early 2000's ?
I know i read the Symantec knowledge base articles.
They also tell guys to disable system restore too.. know why ?

And no your crappy little AV programs won't do squat.
They sell a false sense of security to noobs.

All of you commenting are clueless and might get nailed.
I highly advise going and doing some research on this stuff.
I can tell many of you have no clue what a Ransomware virus is.
If you read even one single News story you would know a lot of infections come from email attachments.

Also back up's are meaningless and only *help*
They are not fool proof.

Smarter guys would recommend a read-only medium too.

All it takes is the virus writer to enumerate your portable devices etc
and then have the malware infect it when it's attached.. trivial.

they can also time bomb you.. so malware would stay dormant until later (after you already made back ups)

they are far smarter than kids who download AV programs LOL
you think they can't bypass Kaspersky or Norton or....
they can do it on demand when ever they want as much as they want.

edit:
cocky ?
try this scenario on for size..
Android + Stagefright
What do carriers tell people to do ?
Turn off auto SMS downloading (it's on by default)
Ever plug a phone into a PC ?

I don;t think most people fathom the dangers that are out there.
It's more a matter if they get luck.
It's not your awesome security.. it's you just got lucky LOL

how? i can just secure erase and install everything again, no virus can go against this, unless we are talking about bios virus, in that case i will change my entire motherboard and again, this time no virus can even do anything

well there are those router virus, but you know again what i can do...

so naive LOL

Ransom is no doubt a great issue with bitcoins. It is a gruesome attack to the pride and purity of bitcoins. Hackers sitting there would hack your bitcoins wallet, steal all the money and demand double money of it in return.. This is really shit and frustrating. And, the worse thing happens when authorities even refuse to take any action and instead say to pay the ransom.
These kind of incidents have though not happened in my locality, but I do hear about all these type of cases now and then.
An official court for crimes related to bitcoins is really missed now.

Just don't pay and throw away your HDD or secure erase/factory reset it. Even when it has important data on it. There is no way to know the guys that are demanding the ransom will seriously unlock your pc or make a second attemt to extort you.

You don't have to save all the information on your PC (especially not passwords). Either take a back up or save it on hard disks that are password protected else use an antivirus that protects your files. The hackers try to make you visit sites that are phishing websites but antiviruses easily detect these attacks.

backups make little difference..

they pull in 325 million a year and growing.. they drive the bitcoin economy.

bitcoin is for criminals, frausters and greedy clowns looking to make a buck..
not the public to be used as a... "currency"

It is true. The program is called ransomare and block your computer asking money in order to have the key which unlock the computer. If you don't do that the impostor ask or do something else with the computer to send away it the program destroy everything.

I had hearing nothing such happen in my city or my country (from the news given at TV) but it is not strange that someday happen even here. The fraud don't have limits and boundaries. If will happen and you don't have backup in a external hard drive of all your important data, you are seriously in trouble. I have all my data in an external drive and those in my computer with which work everyday update the previous ones every week.

then I have two protectors of my computer: Kaspersky Internet Security and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. Both those are a good protection from most of the bad external things that can happen to one computer.

Every serious computer user should have all of their files backed up to the external drive. They are cheap, $50 for 1T.

Evefy serious user should know how to keep their computer almost malware free, especially a crypto user. Combination of a good anti virus, malwarebytes, and a hitman pro scanner should do a job quite well.

Never share publicly how many bitcoins do you have. This will make you more hacker targeted!

If you respect the above then you don't care about these ransome viruses!

I already fix my computer done by this link http://visihow.com/Show_Hidden_Files_Using_Command_Prompt
He just hide all my files The hacker is wise.. LOL.
Now im still scan all my files to remove all viruses and to do not repeat this problem again..
Mcaffee anti virus i think is the one giving me virus on my computer... so i decided to uninstall the software and install avg as my anti virus...
Now all my files are ok... And all my application works.
Thanks for my friends out there and all bitcoin members...
I can not fix it with my self if you all is nothing maybe my computer still suffer about ransom virus...

Around 2 months ago my laptop was also infected by malware. Whenever i open my laptop only one page opened saying my laptop is seized by US government or something and said i have to send 100$ to some bitcoin address. But later i fixed it by formating as i don't have any important files in that laptop. On past they used to use liberty and perfect nowadays criminal,hackers are shifting towards bitcoin.

agree...setup daily backups on your computer and you should be ok. Ransomeware? no problem, wipe and place backup, report the threat to appropriate places.

do a back up problem solved, actually i don't even need one, i can secure erase at any time, nothing vital on my desktop

the only problem would be re-installing everything, which is boring and a bit time consuming(2 hours in my case)

already a thing called ransomware...also many criminals now threatening for bitcoin rather than cash.

I've already installed avg anti virus but some of my files still gone.
All exe files are gone except rar files and folder not all folders and other extension .
I saw few files recovered by anti malware but the extesion is sample.exe.Locked
I was try to remove the locked extension but the file didnt work...
can you suggest other anti virus to unlock all my files?

Some virus scanners now have a lot of the unlock keys loaded into them. Try to find one of these virus scanners and see if it can unlock this specific case.

Might be impossible if he altered the keys though.

Definitely not trying to insult you nor anyone directly. I'd never insult someone asking questions. Anyhow let's compare Bitcoin to cash. Let's say we have 2 users that want to transact money. Person A gives person B 100$. In case that person B wants to be bad and ask for the payment again, person A can't prove that he has paid him. In comparison to this, we have the blockchain (a public, permanent ledger). These Bitcoins have to come from somewhere and have to go somewhere. One could argue that a mixer is helpful, but with a competent person and analysis they get beaten. There's also this problem of who is Person A behind address X? It comes down to the actual skill of that person. If they use some service (e.g. exchange like Coinbase), they could be caught easily (especially if the government is getting information).

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Tl;dr: If you want to be 99% sure that one can't trace you, you have to convert to an anonymous coin e.g. Monero to "clean" your coins (one must also consider the sum, if you get xxx$ through elicit means, then don't convert everything at once from Monero to Bitcoin). This is why we call Bitcoin pseudo-anonymous (use Google for exact examples).

Nothing surprising. I've been experiencing a lot of port scans recently, but they all get blocked by my software.