Indian government issues alert over 'Locky ransomware'

2017 may well go down in history as the year of 'ransomware-attacks'. After WannaCry, Petya/NotPetya, Mamba etc, we have 'Locky' ransomware that's spreading fast amogst Indian users.

State-run Indian Computer Emergency Response Team(CERT-in) has issued an advisory on the spreading of Locky ransomware in the country, urging users to not open any emails with attachments from unknown senders. The malware locks computer files with an encryption program and then demand a ransom to get them unlocked. More than 23 million messages have been sent in a campaign to spread variants of Locky, the government said.

"Reports indicate that over 23 million messages have been sent in this campaign. The messages contain common subjects like 'please print', 'documents', 'photo', 'Images', 'scans' and 'pictures'. However, the subject texts may change in targeted spear phishing campaigns," the alert, which described severity of the ransomware as "high", said.

The messages contain “zip” attachments with Visual Basic Scripts (VBS) embedded in a secondary zip file. "Users are advised to exercise caution while opening e-mails and organisations are advised to deploy anti-spam solutions and update spam block lists," the alert said.

The warning comes month after thousands of computers in India, including those run by police departments in several cities, were affected by the WannaCry ransomware.