The biggest snag, though, was the decryptor I got from the site. A half-hour later, I got a response: “Hello sir, your account is activated now!!! sorry for the delay!” 23, I paid my 0.020135666 Bitcoin and sent a note through Protonmail, an encrypted email service, to the address on the payment page. And while the popular Ranion RaaS costs $900 a year, according to the possibly defunct ad I had tried responding to, this one was only $150.
“his guy has been spamming this shit for days now and acts like no one has ever done this before,” one poster complained, “can’t explain a simple sales pitch about it.” The coder himself had weighed in, telling that critic to “stfu” before mocking him with an obscure reference to the coding language C# and signing off with another “stfu.” Still, the inquiries I’d sent to other sellers had gone unanswered, and a couple others were clearly fake. The consensus on the forum was decidedly skeptical. Even at the time, there were warning signs. The ransomware service I ended up using was the first one I found, a few minutes after logging in to the first hacker chatroom I tried. It’s widely suspected to have been a Russian cyberweapon built neither to steal information nor hold it for ransom, but simply to destroy it. And some attacks turn out not to be ransomware at all: NotPetya, which caused billions of dollars in damages worldwide in 2017, lacked any means to reverse its encryption.
#DEEP WEB HACKING SITES SOFTWARE#
(Some ensure the material is there by first downloading actual child pornography.) Some attackers start by luring victims to a compromised website where a software “exploit kit” can slip the malware through their browser’s vulnerabilities. But there are others: Some attacks pretend to be from a law enforcement agency that’s locked down your machine because of illicit material found there. And the CryptoLocker recipe-phishing, strong encryption, Bitcoin-remains the dominant template for ransomware today. Three Italian computer science researchers traced 771 payments flowing into Bitcoin wallets connected to the ransomware variant, totaling 1226 Bitcoin ($1.1 million at the time), likely a very conservative figure.