Since its inception with the AIDS attack in 1989, Ransomware has instilled fear into many. For a quick background, AIDS, also known as Aids Info Disk or PC Cyborg Trojan, is a trojan horse that replaces the AUTOEXEC.BAT file, which would then be used by the trojan to count the amount of times the device booted. Once this boot counter reaches 90, AIDS would hide directories and encrypt the names of all files on drive C: (rendering the system unusable), at which time the user of the device is then prompted to ‘renew the license’ and contact PC Cyborg Corporation for payment. AIDS was introduced into the systems through a disk called the “AIDS Information Introductory Diskette”, which had been mailed to a mailing list of which the AIDS author, Dr. Joseph Popp had a subscription to.

With the likes of Cryptowall, Cryptolocker, Teslacrypt and probably the most known of all the .locky infection, businesses have been forced to pay out huge sums of money in order to retrieve their data. This may be achieved by restoring backups (if they are lucky) or paying the attackers to release they encrypted files.

But there is a new challenger on the Ransomware scene looking to take over where Locky had been so successful in the past and its name is Zepto. Zepto is the beginning of a new breed of Ransomware that works in a very similar way to Locky. It infects through email files such as .docm (Microsoft Word files with macros) as well as .zip files. However, where it differs is a targeting of a very human emotion: fear. Zepto will tag all files with the same extension, but keep the original file names, which will show the users exactly what they will stand to lose if they do not pay for their data to be released.

This year we have seen Locky, the release of JIGSAW ( a Ransomware which encrypts data and will increase the amount owed over time) and now Zepto. Attackers are becomming increasingly effective at playing on human emotion.

Although Zepto at this time is not a major threat (according to Threatpost only 140,000 messages were sent out), it is a sign of things to come, with attackers concocting more and more clever ways to gain their reward.

On more information on how to protect against Ransomware attacks, contact our team of security experts today.