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"While the name behind the attack might be relatively new, the criminal technique is not. Ransomware gangs render an organisation's computers inaccessible by infecting them with malicious software - malware - and then demanding a payment, typically in cryptocurrency, to unlock the files. In recent years, however, in a process dubbed "double extortion", the majority of gangs steal data at the same time and threaten to release it online, which they hope will strengthen their negotiating hand."

""It's not so much the technical disruption, it's what it does to undermine confidence, like in the financial sector. It gets people quite nervous. It's more that kind of secondary impact," said Jamie Collier, a Mandiant consultant, who described a DDoS as akin to stuffing a thousand envelopes through a letterbox every second."

"The significance of the attack on Krebs is that it looks as though many of the attacks on him came from large numbers of enslaved devices - routers, cameras, networked TVs and the like. "Someone has a botnet with capabilities we haven't seen before," says Martin McKeay, Akamai's senior security expert. The DDoS arms race has just moved up a gear."

""It's accelerating because there's a wide-open, unprotected landscape that people can go to," says Chris Carlson, vice president of product management at Qualys. "It's a gold rush to capture these devices for botnets.""

"That is when the alarm bells went off for Mr Ang. "I saw that there was a text file inside the encrypted folder that showed that it was ransomware, asking for payment to decrypt the files." The company decided not to pay the ransom of US$1,000 (S$1,447). Instead, it spent a week rebuilding about 3,000 infected files with data of the accounts and stocks from hard copy files."

"As explained above, filling in the forms in the fake HTML pages above will send off your password to websites controlled by the criminals. Of course, email passwords are amongst the most valuable credentials for crooks to acquire, simply because many people use their email account for password resets on a multitude of other accounts."

"Ransomware hunters: the self-taught tech geniuses fighting cybercrime"