Chimera Ransomware Threatens to Expose Personal Files and Data on Infected Computers

There is a major insurgency of aggressive ransomware threats that combine additional functions apart from their money extortion schemes. In the latest developments and evolution of ransomware, the Chimera threat stands out amongst most of its newly updated abilities to expose personal files by publishing them online if a ransom is not paid.

The commonality among new crypto-ransomware types of threats is that they seek a fee to be paid while it holds your files as ransom by encrypting them but will later decrypt the files if you pay up. What we have taken notice to lately is that the Chimera ransomware threat has evolved to do something different from its normal encryption duties. Fundamentally, Chimera is now threatening computer users by claiming that it will expose personal files and data over the internet if a fee is not paid.

Computer users, who have the unfortunate case if clicking a malicious Dropbox link within an aggressive spam campaign message, will infect their system with Chimera thus allowing it to encrypt various files while it asks for payment amounting to 2.45 Bitcoins or $694 to get those files back. In the latest variant of Chimera ransomware it is found that it takes matters to a whole other level by threatening to publish the computer user's data online if the payment is not made.

The surprise in the Chimera ransomware's additional threat of exposing personal data on the internet is that it is an empty promise. Chimera's new method and threat of exposing personal information on the internet is a ploy, one that security researchers at Botfrei have found no evidence of being legitimate. They explain that "there is so far no evidence or information whether the criminals have stolen [data] from affected systems or that personal information is already published on the Internet."

While Chimera's threat may seem plausible, it is in fact just another method of it garnering the attention of computer users so they may willingly pay up a fine that is asked for by the threat.

Ransomware has taken on a new light and the new features of Chimera, even if it is a façade, prove how such threats are emerging to collect all the money that they can at the expense of gullible computer users.

Looking into the technical makeup of ransomware threats, we know for a fact that they do not have the option of publishing files online, mostly due to the storage capabilities the cybercrooks behind the threats would require. Moreover, by collecting data and publishing it online it would increase the amount of attention that their malicious actions would receive. The bottom line for ransomware authors is that they want to get paid and quickly and as quietly as possible.