The Latest in IT Security

Confused News regarding Police Ransom Trojans

24
Apr
2012

Computer security is confusing. It’s not a simple topic to write about. Mass media often gets the details wrong.

However, we rarely see as confused news articles as we have with Police Themed Ransomware.

So, what are these Police Themed Ransomwares? They are malicious trojans, spread by online criminals.

What do they do? They lock up your PC, claim that it was locked by the police as you had illegal content on your system and demand a payment to open up the PC.

We’ve written about such Police Themed Ransomwere previously. For more details, see this blog post.

Obviously these police trojans have nothing to do with Bundespolizei, New Scotland Yard or United States Department of Justice – they are just stealing their brand.

But today we saw news agency called ANI publish a confused wire story on the topic.

The story claims that “the scam is believed to come from Scotland Yard’s specialist cyber crime officers, the Police Central e-Crime Unit” and “Scotland Yard has warned that police have detected paedophile or terrorist activity as being behind a virus”.

aninews

The story references an earlier article in The Telegraph, which does get the details correct.

And because ANI is a wire service, the story has already been reprinted across the web.

aninews

No, these police trojans are not coming from the police. Trust us on this one.

Leave a reply


Categories

FRIDAY, MARCH 29, 2024
WHITE PAPERS

Mission-Critical Broadband – Why Governments Should Partner with Commercial Operators:
Many governments embrace mobile network operator (MNO) networks as ...

ARA at Scale: How to Choose a Solution That Grows With Your Needs:
Application release automation (ARA) tools enable best practices in...

The Multi-Model Database:
Part of the “new normal” where data and cloud applications are ...

Featured

Archives

Latest Comments