'.VforVendetta File Extension' Ransomware
Posted: December 9, 2016
Threat Metric
The following fields listed on the Threat Meter containing a specific value, are explained in detail below:
Threat Level: The threat level scale goes from 1 to 10 where 10 is the highest level of severity and 1 is the lowest level of severity. Each specific level is relative to the threat's consistent assessed behaviors collected from SpyHunter's risk assessment model.
Detection Count: The collective number of confirmed and suspected cases of a particular malware threat. The detection count is calculated from infected PCs retrieved from diagnostic and scan log reports generated by SpyHunter.
Volume Count: Similar to the detection count, the Volume Count is specifically based on the number of confirmed and suspected threats infecting systems on a daily basis. High volume counts usually represent a popular threat but may or may not have infected a large number of systems. High detection count threats could lay dormant and have a low volume count. Criteria for Volume Count is relative to a daily detection count.
Trend Path: The Trend Path, utilizing an up arrow, down arrow or equal symbol, represents the level of recent movement of a particular threat. Up arrows represent an increase, down arrows represent a decline and the equal symbol represent no change to a threat's recent movement.
% Impact (Last 7 Days): This demonstrates a 7-day period change in the frequency of a malware threat infecting PCs. The percentage impact correlates directly to the current Trend Path to determine a rise or decline in the percentage.
Threat Level: | 8/10 |
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Infected PCs: | 49 |
First Seen: | December 9, 2016 |
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Last Seen: | May 30, 2021 |
OS(es) Affected: | Windows |
The '.VforVendetta File Extension' Ransomware is a Trojan that holds your files hostage by encoding them with a cipher and selling you the decryption key. Buying decryption help from threat actors often backfires on the victims of these attacks, and malware experts emphasize the much greater reliability of using backups for recovering any data. Standard anti-malware solutions can both protect your PC from this threat or remove the '.VforVendetta File Extension' Ransomware after it's already begun attacking the system.
A Not-Very-Masked Assassin after Your Files
Favorite media products continue being a major thematic tie-in of new Trojan campaigns with the '.VforVendetta File Extension' Ransomware, a recent threat using file encryption for locking its victims out of their data. Although malware researchers have been unable to confirm whether or not the '.VforVendetta File Extension' Ransomware has relationships with previous families of threats, its threat actors appear to possess some degree of experience. Their ransom-collecting infrastructure offers victims an 'easy' way to pay for data recovery while also protecting the con artists from any consequences of the transactions.
Perhaps chosen for its potential relevance to the British EU exiting (AKA 'Brexit') or the recent US presidential election, the '.VforVendetta File Extension' Ransomware incorporates references to the political thriller 'V for Vendetta' movie and graphic novel in its attacks. Any local data that it encodes also receives the '.VforVendetta' extension at the end of its name. However, malware experts express more concern with its encoding attack that uses an encryption algorithm for blocking the affected content, regardless of the name. Once locked, the file is no longer accessible without being decrypted, which may be impossible without help from the '.VforVendetta File Extension' Ransomware's threat actors.
You may find some additional information about the effects of the '.VforVendetta File Extension' Ransomware's payload contained in its ransom note, which it generates in an HTML Web pop-up format. These notes redirect you to a TOR-protected ransoming process where victims are asked to pay money, traditionally cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, in return for a decryption code.
A Timely Revolution against File Encrypting Trojans
The '.VforVendetta File Extension' Ransomware's website format tries to draw attention to the relative simplicity of paying a ransom to get your files decrypted and restored. While con artists benefit from this arrangement by using anonymity-protecting site infrastructures and payment mechanisms that avoid chargebacks, victims risk their money upfront for the possibility of getting nothing. Arguably, this risk is even greater than normal with new Trojans like the '.VforVendetta File Extension' Ransomware that lack the reputations that some threat actors cultivate for providing decryption assistance in a timely fashion.
Early samples of the '.VforVendetta File Extension' Ransomware indicate that the Trojan may be disguising part of its installation mechanism as a Microsoft Office document. This possibility raises the chances of the threat abusing e-mail-based infection vectors. Potential victims can scan any incoming attachments with anti-malware utilities and remove the '.VforVendetta File Extension' Ransomware before it has the chance to encode their files. Otherwise, restoring from a backup may be the only free recovery choice.
As Web surfing activity climbs with the incoming holidays, Web surfers should remember that opening files with unconfirmed identities carelessly is more than just a bad idea: it's a potential loophole for letting Trojans like the '.VforVendetta File Extension' Ransomware take all your files.
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