A new Ransomware Trojan known as ICEPOL has been one of those widespread malware which has been successfully installed approximately 267,786 times worldwide and 42,400 in the USA alone over a five month period, analyzed by the security firm BitDefender.
The ICEPOL Trojan categorized as Ransomware that locks your PC and demand for a ransom amount to unlock it. The Malware was using a previously known vulnerability in Java software i.e. CVE-2013-0422 to infect the systems.
The malware threatened the user with accusations of illegal piracy or 'porn-related activity' and requires money for exemption from punishment that pretends to be from the 'police'.
"The ICEPOL Trojan extorted victims who downloaded it by sending them a message in any one of 25 languages purporting to be from police accusing them of downloading copyrighted material or illegal porn," said Catalin Cosoi, Chief Security Strategist from Bitdefender.
The malware includes one more money making scheme, i.e. Designed to redirect the victims to the website via pay-per-click scam under the traffic exchange mechanism. The police estimated that more than $32,000 was stolen from the U.S. victims over the five-month period.
The Romanian police in cooperation with the Internet security firm Bitdefender found dozens of C&C servers and successfully seized one of the major C&C servers, which was the part of large distribution of ICEPOL Trojans, located in the Romanian capital Bucharest.
"The results of the investigation of ICEPOL Trojan based on cooperation with various law enforcement agencies and third party vendors. Despite the complex investigations, we have so far achieved very good results and we will continue to fight cybercrime", says the head of the agency against cyber crime, the Romanian National Police.
This is not the first time when a ransomware tricked the victims successfully, also last year cryptolocker of the same category hits millions of computer users. So, users are advised to keep their systems software and anti-virus solutions up-to-date and most importantly patch your Java distribution immediately to Update 51.
Stay Safe! Stay Tuned!
