TheExecuter wrote:victims can only pay and retrieve their stuff, if they don't have a backup.
though it won't affect much a high school kid it would affect people who work in an office too much that paying money seems better than reconstructing tons of people's work.
Well for the beginning. Guys behind encoders cannot be consider as "good" or whatever. They even not cyber-criminals, they must be considered as sort of cyber-terrorists.
Here is typical scenario.
You are so unlucky and infected with encoder while browsing pron sites or whatever you do, doesn't matter how you was infected (that's a another question about prevention and PC user training). You have a lot of important files on your PC. All of them are encrypted with strong crypto algorithm, AV won't help (they almost every time play role of useless junk btw). You don't have any backups. You have only two options -> leave it as is (go to police, just cry over your docs), pay ransom.
Now the key part. What you will do.
1) Pay ransom.
a) Cyber-criminals behind encoder were so honest so they gave you decoder. And it works! All your data saved. Fcuk, yeah. It is your data.
On a next day you have your friends/parents/dog with the same problem as yours. All their important data encrypted by another variant of the same shit. They call you asking for advice. How do you feel, bro? You recently just sponsored cyber-terrorists for another act, paying them money for retrieval of your/software vendors stupid mistakes. What you will advice here? Pay ransom too? So encoders achieve their goals. They can spend more money on further development, cryptor support, process automation and then they fly to Bahamas/Dominican wherever, drinking some beer and watching increasing number of victims and pays via their web panels. They can add special "thank you" page where all who have paid will be listed.
b) Cyber-criminals send you fake decoder or just FY message/nothing. Story ends here. This part of scenario only applies for encoders that are not oriented for long TTL. Massive drop and massive profit only one time.
2) Don't pay. Loose your data. Learn on your mistake. It's like a good slap in the face -> if you are not complete idiot you will learn on your mistake. Fight. Protect other people from the same mistake you did. Don't multiple infections, don't support them. No negotiations with terrorists.
Encoders are ITW for a long time. It is obviously that instead of creating yet another junkie software trash every year AV companies must inform people about ACTUAL threats around (not about yet another nobody cares stuxnet alike pure marketing BS), how to PREVENT them, how to GUARD yourself from them. Never wondered why in every stupid AV article you have everything - data dumps, cool diagrams, code snippets, marketing shit, but no ONE word about how to detect/remove/prevent this malware in manual mode.
As for client-server encoder we have obvious strategy here -> active infiltration, gathering data about people who behind this and acting together with police, just like was in case of Reveton (despite the fact it was different type of ransomware). Simple domain shutdown here is ineffective and counterproductive as this data maybe required to law enforcement actions.