Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Regular readers must know that Lao Duan was one of the first people in China to advocate Bitcoin, but later, instead of advocating it, I wrote a series of articles criticizing Bitcoin. How many people will be swallowed up by the "faceless man" of Bitcoin in the process of changing my mind? "this article has made it very clear.

To put it simply, the development of Bitcoin is in fundamental conflict with my values. I didn't see any of the reliable apps I was looking forward to, and those illegal and criminal activities depended on Bitcoin. This reason is also very simple, good people are aboveboard, do not need anonymous currency at all, only those bad guys, afraid that others know who they are, like anonymous currency, so that you can't catch him even if he does bad things. And when these bad guys preach Bitcoin, the reason they use is to fight against the government. , the anarchic world is a paradise for bad guys.

This article would like to remind you of a very dangerous Bitcoin blackmail virus-CryptoWall! Thousands of people have been infected with the virus, and they simply don't want to cry after being hit. I have a friend who accidentally clicked on a virus email attachment sent by someone else. The virus secretly encrypted all the important files on his hard disk. You can no longer open these files. Forced opening is garbled. The photos, articles and projects that this friend has taken over the years have been encrypted by the bad guys. The villain also left a note: if you want to recover these files, you have to pay a ransom of $500 and accept payment only in bitcoin. If you don't pay within five days, the ransom will automatically double, and if you don't pay, the files will never be opened again, which is tantamount to being tortured by the kidnappers.

CryptoWall first began to spread in 2014, when it was version 1.0, and then antivirus software can detect and kill CryptoWall virus, so the virus has been upgraded to version 4.0, and antivirus software can't handle it. CryptoWall is a RSA2048 (now more advanced RSA4096) encrypted virus. The public key is used to encrypt your files, while the private key is stored on his secret server.

Let's take a simple example. * has a gu, which runs into your computer and infects your files, making your files unreadable. If you want to recover these files, you need to find an antidote. This antidote is available only in your hands, but not in others. The antivirus software can indeed kill this one, but the files infected by it still have no way. Can you find the best person to help you? The answer is also no, because RSA4096 is theoretically unsolvable, if even this can be cracked, then the whole world will be out of order, which is the basis of encrypted communication on the whole Internet.

You might think, wouldn't it be nice to just arrest this guy? It's a good idea, but it's hard to catch, because * only supports paying ransoms in bitcoin, which is completely anonymous and untraceable. If he accepts a ransom in US dollars or RMB, he must open an account with the bank so that the police can always find him. But he only accepts bitcoin, so where can you find him?

FBI is said to have said at the 2015 cyber security summit that if * * hijacks your files and asks you to pay a ransom, you can't expect FBI to help you recover your data, so you can pay them a ransom on terms. Even FBI is a pussy. Similar blackmail viruses include Cryptolocker, Reveton and so on, with a total of more than 70 kinds. The ransom demands range from $500 to $10000, and what's even more irritating is that sometimes when you pay the ransom, the ransom disappears, your money is gone, and your documents are gone. At present, the total amount of extortion by such extortion viruses has reached nearly $100m, resulting in losses of nearly $1 billion. Think about it. If all your computers were poisoned, what would the company be like?

The prevalence of the blackmail virus has also fattened some strange people, such as someone on Taobao who claims to be able to provide professional recovery business for the blackmail virus, but the asking price is very high (higher than the ransom). And his way to recover is to pay a ransom to return the antidote. Now you know why his offer is higher than the ransom, because he has to make a fortune on his own. His role is actually the intermediary of the kidnapper, you can't operate bitcoin payment, it doesn't matter, you provide RMB, I will change it into bitcoin for you to give to the kidnapper.

Finally, I would like to tell you a sad truth: in fairy tales, the good guys always prevail over the bad guys, but in fairy tales they are all deceitful. Take the blackmail virus, for example, so far there is no way to punish the bad guys. You can't crack his virus, and you don't know where his people are. All you can do is to be vigilant and prevent yourself from getting hit.

For example, never open the attachment of an unknown email, if you send me an email, do not bring the attachment, because I will delete the email with the attachment directly. Second, do not easily open the weird web address that others send you, or it may be automatically forwarded by the virus. Third, if you usually log on to the computer, there is no need to use the administrator account, the general permission account can also be used. Finally, please back up the important files to your cloud account, so that even if your computer is useless, your files are still there.

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