New Ransomware Program Targets Gamers

Heads up gamers! It looks like the ransomware crew has moved on from the more prevalent business class victims and turned its combined attention towards experienced gamers for their steady illegal income. Bromium Researchers, the discoverers of the CryptoLocker ransomware variant, are presently looking into breaking the 2048-bit encryption code to gain use of game files without paying the ransom.

The malicious program encrypts game saves, maps, profiles, replays, mods—in other words, custom content that users would not be able to recover by simply reinstalling the game.

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MajorDomo said:

Heads up gamers! It looks like the ransomware crew has moved on from the more prevalent business class victims and turned its combined attention towards experienced gamers for their steady illegal income. Bromium Researchers, the discoverers of the CryptoLocker ransomware variant, are presently looking into breaking the 2048-bit encryption code to gain use of game files without paying the ransom.

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Ya sorry I'd just start over

Romale23 said:

Ya sorry I'd just start over

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That is easy to say. However i know gamers who would pay, many of them MMO players, the time and real world money I know some people have sunk into a game, the few MMOs I have played, GW2 is probably what I spent the most on, and since beta that is only $200. But I know people who spend that a WEEK on a single games CS, if not more. One person I helped had invested over 10k into a single character on WoW.

So yes, get the right people, who play the right games and they will pay, then you have stupid people who don't know what to do and just pay it anyway, I don't know how many of those FBI bugs I cleared out from people saying "But I sent the $350 for my fine, how comes they don't unlock it?".

As for trying to break the encryption...Yeah, good luck.

... MMO saves are on the provider's servers. You just wipe and reinstall.

This is literally just for people who care so much about their dragon age save that they'll pay money for them.

Or mod creators who don't use dropbox/offsite backups.

I think steam offers the option to backup saves online.
I think that something like this would require a system wipe.

Yet another reason to hate malware creators.

if the creators are using anything other than bitcoin... it would be quite easily traceable.

Would be nice to see someone with a bit of means track them down and break between 5 and 8 bones in their body.

Laureolus said:

... MMO saves are on the provider's servers. You just wipe and reinstall.

This is literally just for people who care so much about their dragon age save that they'll pay money for them.

Or mod creators who don't use dropbox/offsite backups.

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As I said "you have stupid people who don't know what to do and just pay it anyway". you find the right people who play the right games and many people will fork over lots of money.

That's why you keep regular backups.

A manager at work got hit with this and it encrypted a bunch of files on one of the servers.
Once I cleaned his system, I just restored the files from backup (my backup program backs up any changes every few hours).

Even at home, if you backup to a NAS device every week, you would not loose much.

Yep regular backups for a stack of reasons.

Gamers that value every save can run the game with a batch file that automatically copies new/changed save files to a backup drive before and after running the game.
(use the archive attribute, its always set for a new or changed file and gets unset once a file is copied)