Cryptolocker has been making the headlines lately after National Cyber Crime Unit of UK warned of a large spam attack involving the ransomware and more recently because Swansea Massachusetts police department in the US agreed to pay the asking price in Bitcoin to get their encrypted data back.
However, it seems that the recent surge in Bitcoin prices have had a negative impact on scammer’s earnings because of which they have reduced their asking price of BTC ransom to just 0.5BTC. If the scammers would have stuck to 2BTC – based on the current value – users would have to shell out around £900 ($1400), which may not go down well with many users and would rather be happy with a complete format of their system and a restore of some old backup.
Screenshot of Cryptolocker screen shows demand of $300 (or equal to 2BTC when the price was around $150). But a new sample picked up by Sean Sullivan of F-Secure shows that the scammers have offset the value to just 0.5BTC.
Let us know in the comments section if you system was infected with Cryptolocker and whether you successfully recovered your files by paying the ransom?
