Software Pirate Cracks Cybercriminal Wares
Summary: A 20-year-old French hacker known as Xylitol, a founding member of the warez group redcrew.astalavista.ms, shifted from cracking commercial software to reverse engineering malware kits, releasing cracked copies of the SpyEye Trojan bot builder starting in October 2010 and re-releasing free versions after at least a dozen author updates. Since November 2010 he and associates on the Kernelmode.info forum cracked and published license keys for Russian scareware and ransomware, including daily codes against the WinAd gang, whose last known domain and redirector died around September 14, 2011.
What you should know: The WinAd gang had been shipping five or six ransomware updates a day to stay ahead of the crackers, and a moderator warned the September shutdown 'may mean nothing' - a crew making thousands of dollars is more likely to retool with a new name and harder-to-crack encryption than to walk away.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Malware
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