[BLOG] Meet Rensenware, The Ransomware That Wants You To Get A High Score

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PredictedCyborg
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[BLOG] Meet Rensenware, The Ransomware That Wants You To Get A High Score

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Malware is thoroughly unpleasant stuff, and one of the nastiest pieces of malware to exist is the sub-group of 'ransomware'. Ransomware works by getting into your computer and holding your files hostage, usually by encrypting them or corrupting them in some way - which can only be reversed if you pay the ransom fee and sometimes even then you don't get 100% of your files back. The Internet can bring some very scary things to your computer, and not always in the way we generally expect it to.



However, recently the people over at Malware Hunter Team came across a ransomware program that was a little bit... different. How so? Well, it too held your files hostage but the price of the ransom was to get a high score on the Lunatic difficulty of an anime shoot-em-up game. No, seriously.


Found a surprising ransomware today: "rensenWare".
Not asks for any money, but to play a game until you reach a score - and it's not a joke. pic.twitter.com/Pu53WZFALA
— MalwareHunterTeam (@malwrhunterteam) April 6, 2017


Rensenware, named after the game it wanted you to get the high score in (Touhou Seirensen - Undefined Fantastic Object), challenges unfortunate users who get the malware on their machines to rack up 200 million points on a really hard difficulty level, or lose their access to their files for good.



In case you're wondering why any malicious person online would set that particular ransom, the story is much simpler than that. The program was created by a Korea-based undergraduate student as a joke, and he then placed the source code onto GitHub - this is how it's managed to essentially 'escape' and get into people's computers for real. For what it's worth they've quickly managed to build a program to bypass the locks Rensenware sets and have even issued an apology for letting it get out in the first place.


So, the creator of rensenWare created a tool which writes the values to memory which are needed for the decryption.
Also wrote an apology... pic.twitter.com/LrapKv5Dm3
— MalwareHunterTeam (@malwrhunterteam) April 7, 2017


Sometimes reality really can be stranger than fiction. You literally couldn't make this up.



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