0day Ransomware

The 0day Ransomware is a file-locking Trojan that blocks your computer's files, such as documents, music, or pictures, with encryption. Users can back their media up to other devices for keeping the attack from being damaging excessively, and malware experts rate free recovery possibilities from this threat as being low. Anti-malware services can offer additional defenses by deleting the 0day Ransomware as soon as they spot it either before or after its installation.

Trojans that Name Themselves after Likely Tactics of Attack

The name that criminals choose for a Ransomware-as-a-Service Trojan can be indicative of their thinking processes, and is, sometimes, a crucial element in isolating the infection strategies at work. With the 0day Ransomware, a new variant of the Crysis Ransomware's Dharma Ransomware branch, that brand is a possibly-menacing suggestion that the threat actor of the hour is planning on abusing software vulnerabilities. Unfortunately for the PC owners who lack backups, that 'zero-day' theme implies that installing all your security updates will not help.

Zero-day is a term that refers to both software vulnerabilities without patches – generally, due to not being known to the responsible company – and the exploits that hackers leverage for using them. However, they are expensive for purchasing on the Black Market inherently, unlike the Exploit Kits that use known and patchable bugs or the Ransomware-as-a-Service Trojan families. Hence, if the 0day Ransomware's name is more than an attempted misdirection by its admin, it suggests reasonable funding or software expertise – more than is typical of a generic, file-locking Trojan campaign.

Besides its delivery mechanisms, the 0day Ransomware plays host to the standard payload of its family, whose members range from the very old, like last year' guardbtc@cock.li Ransomware, the Arrow Ransomware or the icrypt@cock.li Ransomware, to new iterations such as the HACK Ransomware. It can use AES-derived encryption for blocking files while adding its customized extension to them, remove the user's Shadow Volume Copy backups, and create two formats of messages with updated e-mails for selling its unlocking service. Victims should, as always, reconsider paying any ransoms and doublecheck their other media restoration possibilities first.

Limiting the Fallout of the Big Zero

Although an update can't stop a genuine zero-day attack, users do have other means available for mitigating these security issues. Disabling Flash, JavaScript, and Java in your Web browser will deprive many drive-by-downloads of some of their essential software platforms. Avoiding torrent networks, updates from unauthorized sources like ad networks, and strange e-mail attachments will further shore up one's chances against such assaults. Most anti-malware suites, also, come with Web-browsing monitoring features and can identify and block harmful content preemptively.

If the 0day Ransomware stays true to the habits of its kind, users may either see intentionally-misleading pop-ups, such as fake anti-virus scans, or nothing at all, while it's locking their files. Malware experts recommend keeping backups elsewhere as a good option for recovering from file-locker Trojans without any financial risk. Anti-malware programs always can delete the 0day Ransomware, and are identifying it at high rates, but lack any decryption capabilities.

The 0day Ransomware's theme is an especially threatening heading for Ransomware-as-a-Service to drift towards in drive-by-downloads. Although file-locking programs are a dime a dozen, it's not so with zero-day exploits, which are 'premium' software weapons capable of delivering severe blows to even the most well-secured PC.