Pierluigi Paganini August 18, 2015

The Turkish security researchers Utku Sen has published the first open source ransomware  for educational purposes that anyone can use.

Ransomware is now open Source and available in GitHub. Ransomware is one of most dangerous cyber threats for end-users, in the recent months the number of ransomware in the wild is increased as never before. Criminal underground has used ransomware to increase their business, security experts also discovered in a case the adoption of malware-as-a-service model to give the opportunity to everybody to build its ransomware campaign.

However is not easy for common people to give a look to the source code of ransomware, but now the Turkish researcher utkusen published on the Github platform the first open course Ransomware, for educational purposes.

Utku Sen unleashed his ransomware, the “Hidden Tear”  is available on GitHub and it’s fully functional, it uses AES encryption to encrypt the files and displays a warning to users to pay up to get back their data.

utkusen  warns, “While this may be helpful for some, there are significant risks. The Hidden Tear may be used only for Educational Purposes. Do not use it as a ransomware!”

The Features of Hidden Tear are:

• Uses AES algorithm to encrypt files.
• Sends encryption key to a server.
• Encrypted files can be decrypt in decrypter program with encryption key.
• Creates a text file in Desktop with given message.
• Small file size (12 KB)
• Doesn’t detected to antivirus programs (15/08/2015)

Note: At this point, I am not sure that the “Hidden Tear” it is not detected by AV programs, but I am not sure.

This Ransomware it is not so advanced like other threat like Cryptowall or Cryptolocker but it does his job, as educational purposes.

You can check the demonstration video made by utkusen: 

About the Author Elsio Pinto

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – ransomware, cybercrime)

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