A new strain of the particularly malicious ransomware variety has been released into the wild in July 2016, and it’s looking to be the new malware to watch out for.
If you’re not familliar with ransomware, read here to learn all about it first.
It’s called Zepto, and this nasty strain of ransomware does what ransomware does best – infects your computer, encrypts all your important files and demands payment to get them back.
It’s a variant of an older version of ransomware called Locky that spread earlier in 2016 and added the .locky extension to all the files it encrypted. That version of ransomware was effectively unbreakable without the decryption key, meaning the only way of retrieving encrypted files back was to pay the criminals via BitCoin on the Dark Web.
Zepto is equally unbreakable, and according to The Register has been carried in over 140,000 spam emails in the first week of July. When it encrypts your files, it adds the .zepto extension to them, hence its name.
Sponsored Content. Continued below...
As with nearly all ransomware variants, the method of infecting victims computers is to lure email recipients to opening dangerous email attachments on their computer. This means if you know what to look out for in terms of malicious email attachments, that will go a long way to helping protect you files, your computer and yourself from becoming infected.
Yes, this means reiterating our previous advice on avoiding malware infections via email – be extremely suspicious of unexpected emails that ask you to open an email attachment. These attachments are often ZIPPED up, and come from people you don’t know. The attachment may have your name included in the filename, which is a clever trick scammers use to lure you into opening the attachment.
Only open up email attachments that you were explicitly expecting from a specific email user.
Also, to ensure your computer is secure, have reliable up-to-date antivirus installed and make sure all of your software (operating system, Internet browser, Flash) have the latest versions installed and you’re no longer using unsupported software (yes that’s directed at you, Windows XP users!)
Zepto is out there in the wild right now, and much like the previous Locky variant, it is expected to net its developers millions of dollars. Don’t be one of those people handing over money. Learn everything you need to know about ransomware in our blog post here.