A new email campaign has recently been seen distributing the infamous Locky ransomware to millions of unsuspecting people.
According to a report by AppRiver, an email and web security company, over 23 million malware-infested emails were sent out in just 24 hours on August 28. The firm deems it as "one of the largest malware campaigns" it has seen in the latter half of 2017.
The messages contained vague subjects, like "please print", "photo", "documents", and "images", among others. A ZIP file is attached to every email, which contains a Visual Basic Script (VBS) file. If executed, it will start to download the latest Locky ransomware variant.
Once the encryption process is done, it will append a ".lukitus" extension to the infected files. It will then ask for 0.5 bitcoins, roughly equal to $2,370, to commence decryption. Considering that there is already a big demand per victim, a small infection rate is already enough to garner the cybercriminals a big payout from the spam campaign.
Unfortunately, there is still no known method to decrypt files that have been infected by the Locky ransomware for free.
All things considered, it helps to have a backup of your files ready, just in case anything goes wrong. Of course, it always helps to be careful of the emails you open, as this is a popular attack vector for malware creators to infect systems, which mostly concern those running Windows.