A ransomware program named Kraken Cryptor is disguised as the popular anti-malware program, SuperAntiSpyware. Users are being tricked into installing what they think is anti-malware protection but which is really a wicked app that encrypts their data and demands money in exchange for the key to decrypting it. Here’s how to avoid traps like this…

The Kraken Has Been Released!

In legend and lore, the Kraken is a terrifying beast that can wreak havoc on humanity. On the Internet, it’s pretty much the same, but without all those teeth and tentacles.

It’s bad enough that ransomware exists, but it’s really bad when it pretends to be something good. Somehow, the malicious purveyors of Kraken Cryptor managed to invade SuperAntiSpyware.com and serve up ransomware instead of the anti-malware program that users expected. This is a bad guy’s fondest dream and the worst nightmare of users and anti-malware developers.

Kraken Cryptor is “malware as a service,” a program maintained on a central server and called by Javascript code planted in a web page. It can attack from any page that is vulnerable to code injections from third-party bad actors. There are many such pages. There are plenty of malicious “script kiddies” who need few technical skills to plant Kraken Cryptor in your favorite website’s home page.

Kraken Cryptor first appeared on security researchers’ radar in August. Malware Hunter Team, a group of security researchers, has been tracking Kraken Cryptor since then. The team discovered the disguised version 1.5 of Kraken Cryptor at SuperAntiSpyware’s site on September 14, 2018, and sounded the alarm in a series of Tweets. important to note that Kraken Cryptor is a “new improved” variant of plain old Kraken malware, which is not ransomware. It’s easy to confuse the two. Also important: avoiding Kraken Cryptor is NOT as simple as staying away from SuperAntiSpyware.com.

If you downloaded the legitimate installer (without the “s” at the end) then you are safe; Kraken Cryptor has not infiltrated that file. The legit installer will install Super Anti Spyware as expected. A statement from SuperAntiSpyware.com says that the rogue file was somehow uploaded to their download server, but it was “discovered and removed within several hours.” Kraken Cryptor is now being distributed by “affiliates” using an exploit kit that can be used to host the ransomware on compromised websites.

Curiously, Kraken Cryptor checks the language and location of the target computer and will not encrypt machines located in certain countries; those nations are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Latvia, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Brazil. Yes, you could immunize your PC by moving to Kazakhstan, or changing your location setting to one of the “exempt” nations. But if you do not read and write that nation’s language, it won’t do you any good.

The ransom demanded by Kraken Cryptor is one-eighth (0.125) of a Bitcoin. The price of a Bitcoin fluctuates wildly but as I type this the ransom is about $800 USD.

Kraken Cryptor takes multiple steps to make it impossible to decrypt one’s hostage data without paying the ransom. The only free recovery hope is a recent clean backup copy of your data. You could pay the ransom, but I advise against doing so.

First, there is no guarantee your data will be decrypted if you pay. The promise of a crook is worthless. It would make more sense, from the crook’s perspective, to demand even more money once it is determined that you are willing and able to pay. Second, paying a ransom encourages more ransomware. You could become known as an easy mark, and the target of multiple extortionists.

Kraken Cryptor even displays the same thumbnail icon as the real SuperAntiSpyware. It’s possible that the authors of Kraken Cryptor did one small good deed, but it may just as well have been a mistake. The legitimate installation file for SuperAntiSpyware is named SUPERAntiSpyware.exe. The disguised Kraken Cryptor installation file is named SUPERAntiSpywares.exe. The only difference apparent is the addition of a letter “s” at the end of the filename.

Protecting Against Kraken and Other Forms of Ransomware

Instead, protect yourself against ransomware by a) maintaining current, tested backups of all your important data. Read past blog here 9 good reasons to backup will get you started on the road to painless, automatic backups that are immune to ransomware infection.

Another idea is to use security software that monitors the behavior of all running programs, and blocks any action that might lead to encryption before actual harm is done. MalwareBytes Anti-Malware is one paid security suite that has this “behavior analysis” feature.

But there’s an even better option. Instead of relying on “blacklists” of known viruses, and giving potentially rogue programs a chance to test their mettle against your security software, why not block ALL programs from running, unless they are known to be legit? That “whitelist” approach is implemented in PC Matic’s Super Shield, which only lets known good programs run on your computer.

Have you been sucker-punched by ransomware? If so, how did you handle it? If not, do you think you are vulnerable?

Have a great week!

ZI Staff

Two storage technologies compete in the hard drive market; one dates back to 1956, the other became widely available to consumers less than a decade ago. As you might expect, the latter is vastly superior in performance. Today, the price difference between them is still significant but narrowing rapidly. Let’s take a look at the venerable Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and its blazing-fast successor, the Solid State Disk (SSD)…

SSD vs. HDD: Battle for the Bits

Open the shiny steel case of a conventional HDD and you will find anostalgic array of parts that strongly resemble a vinyl record turntable. There are stacked platters of rigid substrate coated with magnetic particles; the magnetic state of each tiny spot on these disks determines whether it is recognized as a 1 or 0 for data processing purposes.

There is also an armature that moves back and forth across the disk, and at its tip is a sensor called a read-write head, analogous to the needle in a phonograph’s armature. There is an armature for each stacked disk, giving the overall armature the appearance of a comb.

The phonograph’s needle reads the tiny back-and-forth jiggles of a groove cut into a vinyl record to reproduce the sounds that made groove. As it flies over the surface of the spinning disk, the HDD’s read-write head can both read the magnetic state of spots on the disk and change that state to write data to them.

Spinning vinyl records topped out at 78 rpm. The disks in a HDD spin at 5,400 to 7,200 rpm typically; some high-performance HDDs may reach 10,000 rpm. This rotation speed largely determines how fast data can be read and written on the HDD. How much data can be stored on a standard-sized HDD is called its “data density” and is largely a function of the read-write head’s precision plus the speed at which the disk spins.

Electric motors drive all the moving parts of a HDD. The bearings in those motors are the HDD’s Achilles heel, the typical point of failure. When your HDD starts making rumbling noises it’s a sign that its bearings are starting to wear out; when the sound changes to “grinding” disaster is imminent and you had better have a current backup of your data.

It’s All About the Donuts

By contrast a solid-state drive (SSD) contains no moving parts. Instead, it is filled with flash memory, the same stuff found in USB flash drives. Think of flash memory as a densely-woven 3-D fabric of crisscrossing wires. At the junction of two wires, electrical current can change the state of a tiny donut-shaped bit of metal; these metal donuts (also called gates) are arranged in a 3-D array.

The electrical state of a gate determines whether it is counted as a 1 or 0. (Each gate can have other states as well, which increases potential data density.) The state of a gate is retained even when electricity is turned off.

Electrons move at nearly the speed of light, so flipping a gate’s state is nearly instantaneous. So is reading the state of any gate given its x-y-z coordinates in the array. So an SSD is silent and supremely fast.

The silence is a blessing and a drawback; there is no early-warning rumbling to let you know your SSD will soon fail. On the other hand, an SSD is nearly immune to damage by dropping or jostling, whereas such shocks can knock the read-write head of an HDD into a magnetic disk to scratch and destroy it. An SSD does not suffer mechanical wear due to friction, so it should last much longer than an HDD.

A Windows 10 PC with an HDD may take tens of seconds to boot up. The same machine equipped with an SSD will boot in the blink of an eye. Additionally, applications that read and write large quantities of data on mass storage work much faster with an SSD than with an HDD. Such applications include gaming, video editing, working with large databases or spreadsheets, and more. But every app that uses mass storage benefits from an SSD. That time saving alone is enough to justify the extra cost of an SSD in many people’s minds.

SSDs come in the same form factors as HDDs, including standard SATA interfaces, so they can be plug-and-play replacements for HDDs. SSDs come in other form factors too: SD cards, memory sticks, and more. Solid state memory is a versatile medium.

Storage Prices Continue to Drop

Price per gigabyte is one way to measure the value of mass storage, the HDD still reigns supreme. Back in 1981 when the IBM PC debuted, HDD prices were in the range of $300,000 per gigabyte. In 1995, when the Web was young, prices had dropped to $750 per gigabyte. Today, you can buy HDD storage for about three cents per gig. By contrast, SSDs cost about 10 times more per gigabyte.

Gartner Research predicts HDD storage will cost as little as $0.001 (one-tenth of a cent!) per gigabyte in 2021. Will SSD prices continue to drop at the same rate? Time will tell.

Capacities of HDD and SSD drives will continue to grow as greater data density becomes feasible. I can’t imagine needing 15 TB of storage but those who do will be able to get it in SSD or HDD, according to Gartner.

SSD drives do wear out. There is a limit to the number of times the state of one of those “donuts” can be flipped before it simply stops working. Circuitry within an SSD keeps track of the number of times every donut has been flipped, and retires those that are too near their expected life’s end. Over time, less space is available on an SSD due to these retirements. But in practical terms, your computer will probably be obsolete before that happens.

HDDs will always have a place in data processing, the place where low cost per gigabyte is most important. When it comes to performance, shock-resistance, and overall longevity, the future seems to belong to SSD.

When I bought my Dell Alienware computer about a year ago, I ordered a 1TB SSD drive to accommodate (main drive) 3TB hard drive that shipped with it. The Samsung SSD came with software called Samsung Data Migration, which made it super-easy to transfer everything from my existing hard drive, and make the new SSD my primary C: drive. I run Second life firestorm viewer from the SDD and its screams at startup.

The result was pretty dramatic. Startup time was slashed, programs open quicker, and everything just works faster. At current prices and capacities, I would recommend a solid-state drive as an excellent investment for any PC or Mac owner.

Have you moved from HDD to SDD in your computer?

Have a great week

Zi Staff

The October 2018 Windows 10 Update (to version 1809) is rolling out now. Should you grab it, wait for it, or dodge it as long as possible? Here’s what you need to know… Whats this have to do with your Second Life Experience? Well as I always point out if your machine is not running up to date then YOU WILL have issues with second life viewer!

Should You Postpone the October Windows 10 Update?

It seems like we return to this question about every six months. That’s because we do face two annual major updates to Windows 10. These major updates are different from the monthly Patch Tuesday bug fixes and security patches.

Major updates add features to an already complex piece of software. They also update the list of hardware platforms that Windows 10 will run on. You didn’t really think that 20-year-old PC sporting a Pentium-III processor was going to last forever, did you?

One thing that never changes is the price spectrum of hardware. For just under $500 you can have a machine that runs Windows, barely; it will be a serviceable but painfully slow ride. Between $501 and $1000 is the “respectable” neighborhood. $1001 to $2000 will get you envious looks. Anything over $2000 and you’re either a hardcore gamer or an Apple fan.

It’s funny how that works out every time, isn’t it? But no so much when you consider how closely Microsoft works with Intel, AMD, and the major PC OEMs.Another thing that never changes is the “early reports of problems when the latest update is installed.” Yes, twice a year the folks who get the major update earliest run an increased risk of data loss or system failure, the kind that only a full backup can repair. That leads to the question, “Should I grab the update now or wait until the bugs are ironed out?”

An article in ZDNet warns that some users have experienced the loss of documents, photos and music after being updated to Windows 10 version 1809. It also advises that you should abort the update if you get a warning about Intel drivers.

Microsoft is trying hard to make that choice for you, by rolling out the latest updates in stages that may span two or three months. At each stage, the company collects feedback and fixes bugs before rolling out the next stage. The most modern hardware gets the updates first, while older, more fragile systems get it last. So if you have an old machine that is compatible with the latest Windows version, your safest bet is to wait for the update to come to you via Windows Update.

What’s in the October Windows 10 Update?

If you see something in the list of new features that you just cannot wait a few weeks to have, you can get it now simply by running Windows Update and telling it to check for updates.

Hmmm, there’s the “Your Phone” app, which gives you “instant access to your Android’s most recent photos on your PC,” and the ability to tweak the settings for your “wireless projection experience.” They tossed in some security and registry editor improvements, and some stuff for business customers. Personally, I am not in dire need of any of the new features; they are “nice to have” but not “must have right now” features for me.

Some people do manual updates to control when Windows installs a major update. One’s system is always unusable for a significant amount of time during an update, and that drives some people crazy. Microsoft has made meaningful strides in reducing update downtime, cutting it by 31% versus the April update, the company says. But if you want the update now instead of when you are doing something important, then check for updates via Windows Update.

Even the automatic update is less likely to interrupt your work this time. Machine learning enables Windows to better recognize patterns in your use of your PC, and choose a time slot in which to update when it will be least intrusive.

Windows S and Windows Home edition users cannot postpone installation of feature updates. If you have the Pro or Enterprise edition, you can postpone such updates for up to six months by configuring the delay in Windows Update.

So those are your options. As for me, I intend to just let nature (and Windows) take their own courses. I’ve got multiple redundant backups, do you?

Have a great week

ZI Staff