Tahsin Rahman Oshin
Andrew Brandt of US firm Blue Coat discovered about a phishing scam and contacted the BBC after hearing an episode of BBC’s Radio 4’s You and Yours. He found out that the scam was associated to a ransomware called Maktub. What the malware does is: it encrypts the victim’s files, once it gets in touch with them, and demands a certain amount of ransom to be paid before unlocking and releasing the files.
The phishing emails that were sent to the victim said that the victims owned hundreds of dollars to UK businesses and governments and they could print an invoice by clicking on a link. When they clicked on that link, the victims were lead to the malware, Brandt explained. It’s incredibly fast and by the time the warning message had appeared on the screen it had already encrypted everything of value on the hard drive – it happens in seconds,” Mr Brandt told the BBC. “This is the desktop version of a smash and grab – they want a quick payoff.”
The deputy head of UK’s national fraud and cyber crime reporting centre Steve Proffitt says, “We have been inundated with this,” “At Action Fraud on Monday we received an additional 600 calls and from then onwards we’ve received 500 calls to our contact centre a day,” he added. Mr Proffitt advises people receiving those phishing emails to not click on the link at all, and delete the messages completely.