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KEYHolder Ransomware

Posted: December 12, 2014

Threat Metric

Threat Level: 10/10
Infected PCs: 33
First Seen: December 12, 2014
Last Seen: April 2, 2020
OS(es) Affected: Windows

KEYHolder Ransomware Screenshot 1The KEYHolder Ransomware is a file encryptor Trojan that makes popular formats of files on your PC unreadable, and then requests a ransom fee to restore them back to normal. As usual for such attacks, paying the five hundred USD price demanded by the KEYHolder Ransomware is unnecessary for restoring your files, assuming the presence of appropriate anti-malware solutions and good file backup protocols. However, the KEYHolder Ransomware may interfere with the System Restore feature and be responsible for other security risks until you can remove the KEYHolder Ransomware from your PC.

The File Locker Hiding Behind an Onion Browser

The KEYHolder Ransomware may be in distribution in the wild, but recently was associated with e-mail campaigns targeting various US-based company networks. In addition to infecting the initially compromised PCs, the KEYHolder Ransomware also attacked local network-linked machines. Current evidence leads malware experts to suspect that the latter attacks are based on a backdoor exploit allowing third parties to issue direct instructions to the KEYHolder Ransomware, as opposed to an automatic, worm-based infection method.

The KEYHolder Ransomware targets popular file formats for images, audio files and documents, encrypting them to make them temporarily unreadable. Unusually, the modified files don't have their file names changed, which could make it difficult to identify the KEYHolder Ransomware-affected files without opening each one individually. These modifications may not affect all files of a given format, and the KEYHolder Ransomware has been seen targeting the contents of certain folders, such as My Documents, specifically.

In addition to its file encrypting attack, the KEYHolder Ransomware also provides instructions in text and image formats supposedly for decrypting your data. The KEYHolder Ransomware recommends your use of Tor, an anonymity-enabling browser, to pay a fee for recovering your information from its attacks. As always, there are no meaningful guarantees that the KEYHolder Ransomware's maintainers will provide any decryption solutions afterward, and you should take any promises this threatening software makes with a large grain of salt.

Holding the Keys to Your Escape from File Encrypting Attacks

Along with fraudulent e-mail messages, the KEYHolder Ransomware also has been confirmed to use specially modified versions of Adobe Flash installers as ways to infect new PCs. Outdated JavaScript also is an estimated instigator of the KEYHolder Ransomware infections due to the accompanying vulnerabilities that could allow attacks. PC users, both personal and professional, that may be victims of the KEYHolder Ransomware attacks also should monitor their local network security, thereby preventing the KEYHolder Ransomware from encrypting files for other systems on the same network.

Paying a KEYHolder Ransomware's fee may or may not give you access to new solutions to save your files, but malware experts recommend restoring them from a remote backup, as the cheapest alternative. Anti-malware tools can, as always, be helpful in removing the KEYHolder Ransomware, although file decryption typically requires specialized tools. Due to the recent identification of the KEYHolder Ransomware, its limited samples and restricted distribution, malware experts have yet to find any functional decryption tools made available by third parties. Thus, prevention continues to be the ideal defense against the KEYHolder Ransomware and similar threats.

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