Haxerboi Ransomware

The Haxerboi Ransomware is a Trojan that the threat actors can create minor variants of with the Haxerboi toolkit. The Haxerboi Ransomware's attacks may lock your files by converting them into encrypted formats, after which, the Haxerboi Ransomware displays a pop-up asking for Bitcoins. Backing up your work to another computer or storage device can eliminate most of the dangers of this threat, and most anti-malware programs should delete the Haxerboi Ransomware safely.

Memes Becoming Trojan-Making Machines

The sometimes-subversive humor of the hacking community often affects both the cosmetics and the practical implementation of features in different threatening software types. Recently, this phenomenon has become relevant to the file-locking Trojan industry particularly, as malware experts see a potential source of data-ransoming campaigns. The Haxerboi Ransomware is a creation of the still-in-development Haxerboi toolkit, which can generate multiple types of threats for different purposes, and themes itself after the 'Kung Fury' movie's 'Hackerman' character.

The 0.1 version of the toolkit that's available to malware analysts includes features for hacking Web accounts, including e-mail, harvesting IP information, and, supposedly, attacking government networks. It also provides a 'ransomware' option: the Haxerboi Ransomware, which the user generates after choosing a Bitcoin wallet and a price for collecting the ransoms. Presumably, the full version of the toolkit will provide the Haxerboi Ransomware with a simple encryption attack that locks files such as Word documents via AES, RSA or XOR algorithms.

For now, however, malware analysts only confirm the Haxerboi Ransomware's capabilities regarding its pop-up, which carries the ransom note. This message is a reproduction from the Spongebob 2.0 Ransomware and imitates the visual format of the WannaCryptor Ransomware family. Although it issues with it a timing warning before the ransom increases, users should avoid paying, if possible, for data that they could retrieve in other ways.

Why Fictional Hackers are No Laughing Matter

Updates to the executable generator could make the Haxerboi Ransomware just as able of blocking different media types as widely-known families like Hidden Tear or EDA2. Because even basic and quickly-implemented encryption attacks can be secure sufficiently that their victims can't reverse them, you always should keep backups of any necessary files on another device. In ideal cases, samples of both the Haxerboi Ransomware and any encrypted data may be useful to reputable members of the cyber-security community for developing a free decryption program that could 'unlock' the files.

Since any threat actor can generate a variant of the Haxerboi Ransomware without needing any programming expertise, malware analysts can't estimate what infection vectors this Trojan might use necessarily. E-mail attachments, the Web browser-run Nebula Exploit Kit, torrents, and brute-force attacks against network login combinations are some of the different ways that file-locking Trojans compromise new PCs. Windows users should have their anti-malware products determine the appropriate course of action for uninstalling the Haxerboi Ransomware, or, preferably, let them detect and delete it before it attacks.

The Haxerboi Ransomware may be a perpetual work-in-progress, but it also could become a finished Trojan within days. Those with files worth anything shouldn't leave it to chance as to whether or not that data remains safe, in the future.