to their own accounts at the expense of ransomware distributors -- and their victims , according to security researchers . Ransomware distributors expecting an easy payday are having their illicit earnings stolen by other cybercriminals , who are hijacking the ransom paymentsAttack.Ransombefore they 're received and redirecting them into their own bitcoin wallets . But not only are the attacks giving criminals a taste of their own medicine in becoming victims of cyber-theft , they are also preventing ransomware victims from unlocking their encrypted files -- because , as far as those distributing the malware are concerned , they never received their ransom paymentAttack.Ransom. Uncovered by researchers at Proofpoint , it 's believed to be the first scheme of its kind , with cybercriminals using a Tor proxy browser to carry out man-in-the-middle attacks to steal the cryptocurrency payments , which victims of ransomware are attempting to sendAttack.Ransomto their attackers . The attacks take advantage of the way ransomware distributors requestAttack.Ransomvictims to use Tor to buy the cryptocurrency they need to make the ransom paymentAttack.Ransom. While many ransomware notes provide instructions on how to download and run the Tor browser , others provide links to a Tor proxy -- regular websites that translate Tor traffic into normal web traffic -- so the process of payingAttack.Ransomis as simple as possible for the victim . However , one of the Tor gateways being used is altering bitcoin wallet addresses in the proxy , and redirecting the paymentAttack.Ransominto other accounts , rather than those of the ransomware attacker . Meanwhile , those behind Magniber ransomware appear to have moved to combat bitcoin address replacement by splitting the HTML source code of wallets into four parts , thus making it harder for proxies to find the address to change . While the sums of bitcoin stolen do n't represent a spectacular haul , the interception attacks do create problems for ransomware distributors -- and their victims . The victims are the ultimate losers in this scenario . Not only are they payingAttack.Ransomhundreds or even thousands of dollars to in ransom demandsAttack.Ransom, they 're not even getting their files back in return because the man-in-the-middle attacks mean the ransomware distributors do n't think they 've been paidAttack.Ransom.
In wake of an attack on computers at Colorado ’ s DOT , experts at Webroot shed light on ransomware Last month , employees at the Colorado Department of Transportation were greeted by a message on their computer screens similar to this : “ All your files are encrypted with RSA-2048 encryption . … It ’ s not possible to recover your files without private key . … You must sendAttack.Ransomus 0.7 BitCoin for each affected PC or 3 BitCoins to receive ALL Private Keys for ALL affected PC ’ s. ” CDOT isn ’ t payingAttack.Ransom, but others have . In fact , so-called ransomware has become one of the most lucrative criminal enterprises in the U.S. and internationally , with the FBI estimating total paymentsAttack.Ransomare nearing $ 1 billion . Hackers use ransomware to encrypt computer files , making them unreadable without a secret key , and then demand digital currencyAttack.Ransomlike bitcoin if victims want the files back — and many victims are falling for that promise . To better understand how ransomware works and how it has spread so effectively , The Denver Post talked with Broomfield anti-malware company Webroot , which got its start in the late 1990s cleansing computer viruses from personal computers . “ The end goal is just to put ransomware on the computer because right now the most successful way for cybercriminals to make money is with ransomingAttack.Ransomyour files , ” said Tyler Moffitt , a senior threat research analyst at Webroot . Ransomware infects more than 100,000 computers around the world every day and paymentsAttack.Ransomare approaching $ 1 billion , said U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein during the October 2017 Cambridge Cyber Summit , citing FBI statistics . A study by researchers at Google , Chainalysis , University of California San Diego and NYU Tandon School of Engineering estimated that from 2016 to mid 2017 , victims paidAttack.Ransom$ 25 million in ransomAttack.Ransomto get files back . And one out of five businesses that do pay the ransomAttack.Ransomdon ’ t get their data back , according to 2016 report by Kaspersky Labs . It ’ s a growing business for cybercriminals . And whether to pay or not is something each user or company must decide . Last spring , the Erie County Medical Center in New York was attackedAttack.Ransomby SamSam due to a misconfigured web server , according to The Buffalo News . Because it had backed up its files , the hospital decided not to payAttack.Ransomthe estimated $ 44,000 ransomAttack.Ransom. It took six weeks to get back to normal at a recovery cost of nearly $ 10 million . More recently in January , the new SamSam variant sneakedAttack.Ransominto Indiana hospital Hancock Health , which decided to payAttack.Ransom4 bitcoin , or about $ 55,000 , in ransomAttack.Ransom. Attackers gained entry by using a vendor ’ s username and password on a Thursday night . The hospital was back online by Monday morning . Other times , malware isn ’ t so obvious . Some propagate when user visits infected websites . A trojan named Poweliks injected bad code into vulnerable programs , like an unpatched Internet Explorer . Poweliks crept into the Windows registry to force the computer to do all sorts of nasty things , from demanding a ransomAttack.Ransomto joining a click-fraud bot network to click ads without the user even realizing it . There also are booby-trapped ads , known as malvertising . They get into computers by , again , targeting flawed software and injecting malicious code . This has targeted programs like unpatched Adobe Flash Player , Java or other runtime software , or software that runs online all the time .