دانلود کتاب باج‌افزار – تست نفوذ و برنامه‌ریزی احتمالی

Believe it or not, ransomware is really not anything new. It goes back a long time, well even before phishing became a household term. The only reason we hear so much about it now in the news headlines is that there have been many more attacks that involved ransomware as of late. As it will be explored in more detail, the greatest fear of a ransomware attack is not so much the digital types of attacks that have been so prevalent, but rather, the real damage will come when there is a large-scale ransomware attack that is launched onto our critical infrastructure systems. In this section, we review the chronological timetable of how ransomware actually evolved, and how it has become the large-scale threat today. The Year 1989 The World Health Organization (WHO) held its conference about the disease known as the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). The organizer of this 1989 conference, a professor of biology from Harvard University by the name of Joseph L. Popp actually mailed out 20,000 floppy disks to all the conference attendees. An example of this kind of disk is illustrated next: Supposedly, the floppy disk in question appeared to have a questionnaire in it, which would give the recipient the ability to assess if somebody they know has AIDS. But in reality, this floppy disk contained a malicious payload, and because of that, all 20,000 (and perhaps even more) were infected by it. Soon enough, this became the first true ransomware attack, and it was called the “AIDS Trojan”. From here, all the files on the victim’s computers were encrypted, and a ransom of $189.00 was demanded. Of course, virtual currencies like Bitcoin did not exist at the time, so a check was demanded to be sent to an unknown address in Panama. But the good news here is that since this malicious payload was actually quite easy to reverse engineer, IT Security specialists at the time were able to come up rather quickly with a decryp¬tion algorithm, so that the victims could gain control of their computers once again. Because of this, Joseph L. Popp became known affectionately as the “Father of Ransomware”.