The latest strain of ransomware has arrived. And it’s called Odin.
Our readers should be aware of another variant of the notorious ransomware malware that has been released into the wild, and it’s the latest permutation of the prolific Locky ransomware. It’s called Odin.
If you’re not familiar with ransomware yet, then you’re late to the party. But it’s not too late to catch yourself up – read our “everything you need to know” guide concerning ransomware here.
But for those that want the quickest of summaries, ransomware is that nasty malware that encrypts all your personal files, and doesn’t let you have them back unless you pay for it, and even if you do cough up, there’s still no guarantee you’ll get that all-important decryption key that you’d need. It’s quickly become one of the most profitable and popularly used types of malware out there.
One of the most popular brands of ransomware was called Locky, so called because when it encrypted all of your files, it gave them the extension .locky. It managed to infect many thousands of computers and most likely net its developers a LOT of money. The next “edition” to Locky was called Zepto, which gave encrypted files the .zepto extension, but internally was just an adaptation of Locky.
And now we have another adaptation, called Odin, a name fans of Norse mythology (or the Marvel universe) will be more than familiar with. As you probably guessed, this latest strain of ransomware gives encrypted files the extension .odin.
It’s essentially an adaptation of the original .locky version with some minor differences in place, presumably to try and fool antivirus security. However, its effects are still devastating. If you get infected, any files it managed to encrypt are essentially lost unless you risk paying up or were sensible enough to make a back-up.
Upon infection, the malware leaves webpage shortcuts linking to the BUY page, where you can purchase BitCoins to get the decrypt key to unlock your files. Don’t speak English? Don’t worry, the page allows you to choose your native language – something more reminiscent with legitimate software, not crooked extortion.
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Like most strains of ransomware, Odin is primarily distributed through infected email attachments – those emails that try and lure recipients into opening malicious email attachments through various social engineering techniques. So if you’re well versed in spotting email malware scams, you’re already ahead of the game when it comes to avoiding this latest ransomware scare.
If you need some help spotting such email scams, take a look at our 10 real world examples and you should get a pretty good idea how these scams work and what to look out for.
Remember, ransomware is one of the most popularly encountered types of malware out there today, and it can be devastating to those who don’t back up their files. So make sure you keep recent backups, have reliable security software installed and you educate yourself about the latest online scams out there today.
Read our guide about ransomware right here.
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