Researchers from threat intelligence company Recorded Future have said that it is now possible to start your own ransomware outfit for as little as the price of an iPod Nano and some headphones which might cost $175 only.
Two Researchers – Diana Granger and Andrei Barysevich told on 4th March 2017 while observing a member who goes by the name ‘Dereck1’ of the Dark Web forum called as ‘Exploit’ mentioned about a new ransomware called ‘Karmen’.
Nowadays RAAS (Ransomware-as-a-Service) is becoming popular by targeting businesses, hospitals, financial institutions, and individuals worldwide and extorting millions of dollars.
More strange things are that this ransomware now comes with a friendly User Interface were even a non-techie could deploy it to make loads of money. A Dashboard is available for buyers to keep a running tally of the number of infections= profit in real time.
An Open-source ransomware building toolkit Hidden Tear is used to building the Karmen RAAS is now sold by a Russian-Speaking hacker who goes by the alias name ‘DevBitox‘.
Karmen encrypts files on the infected machine using the strong AES-256 encryption protocol, making them inaccessible to the user and the user needs to pay a large sum of money to obtain the decryption key.
If you are a security researcher then it would be a tough time to investigate the affected computer as Karmen auto-deletes its decryptor if a sandbox environment or analysis software is installed.
First signs of Karmen was noticed in December 2016 in Germany and sales in the United States began in dark web forums from March 2017.
As of today, 20 copies of Karmen malware were sold by DevBitox, while only five copies remain available to potential buyers.
For safeguarding against this ransomware infections,
- Take periodic backups of your data.
- Have an Anti-Virus Suite on your System.
- Never open emails attachments from Suspected accounts.
- Browse the Internet Safely and Anonymously using VPN.
He has even promoted the Raas in action in this youtube video.