Ransomware Authors Break New Ground With Petya
Ransomware developers appear to have come up with a new way of making life miserable for victims of their extortion campaigns, even as federal officials in the US and Canada Thursday issued an alert on the scourge.
Security vendor F-Secure on Friday issued an alert on Petya, a new ransomware sample that locks the entire hard disk of a computer instead of simply encrypting files on disk like other ransomware tools.
According to F-Secure, Petya encrypts the filesystem’s master file table (MFT) ensuring that the operating system is unable to locate needed files, thereby rendering the computer completely unusable.
“It installs itself to the disk’s master boot record (MBR) like a bootkit. But instead of covert actions, it displays a red screen with instructions on how to restore the system,” F-Secure senior security researcher Jarkko Turkulainen wrote.