During the weekend the iobit forum was hacked and I received an email from the official iobit address inviting me to download the premium version of their software as it would be free for all members for 1 year.
Everything seemed legit until once the installation started I understood that this was a ransomware and nearly all my files in that pc have been encrypted.
It was a complex attack engineered so well that even those with a good sense of security practices fell for it. A good explanation of the attack can be found here
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/iobit-forums-hacked-to-spread-ransomware-to-its-members/The forum is still offline after more than 24 hours, for now after contactig the support the only thing I was advised is to do nothing if possible until the nature of the attack is more clear. I installed it in an old laptop which I hardly ever use so I can wait but that's not much of a consolation.
The strangest thing about this whole story is that these hackers specifically asked to be paid only with a privacy coin called DERO, which I've seen to be virtually unknown for now. I wonder why not choose a more common and easy-to-buy coin like monero? Do they know something about it?
They seem so convinced that its price will go up that they promise (if you pay the ransom of 200 dero) to return the equivalent of $500 back when dero will be worth $ 100/coin. Obviously they're probably just trolling but I wonder why doing all that work and risking so much to ask for such a small cap coin? Are they trying to drive up it's price? They also publicly plead to blame iobit for the attack and ask to pressure them to pay the ransom of 100k dero, after that, they would unlock all the devices. Do you think a company like iobit could ever think of paying the ransom? I checked quickly and to buy 100k dero they would need 5-6 btc (about 200k dollar) but the price of the coin would make at least x4. I have no idea if that amount is affordable for them but although I doubt they will pay they certainly suffered severe reputational damage (already low) with this attack.
If this is the first attack of this type I wonder if in the future there will be others and if they will always ask for dero as a ransom do you think the value of this coin could go up a lot?
All the story is pretty strange, if somebody here have some theories I'd be curious.
