The original creator of the Love Letter worm allegedly argued that he should be able to steal internet login passwords from people who had better access than him. His argument to the university he was attending was that internet access was a human right, and the people he’d be targeting would barely feel the loss. When the university disagreed, he created the worm, infected approximately 10 million computers world-wide, and kicked off a new sort of social engineering that remains effective to this day!
The Love Letter worm snuck in via email: infected users would have their email contacts list yanked, and then emails containing an attachment with the phrase “kindly check the attached love letter from me!” would be sent out from that user’s address to their contacts. Since this was not a well-known attack vector, people would often open the attachment in spite of the odd file type, and become infected themselves.
While Love Letter was a total pain in the butt to spot and remove, it was after the passwords directly, and deleted the rest of the hard drive’s contents. Very annoying – potentially devastating to anyone who didn’t have a backup of their computer, and who’d lose precious photos or videos to the Love Letter worm – but less potentially life-ruining than stealing someone’s identity on top of ransoming them. Today’s ransomware works on many of the same principles, but jacked up to 11, an effort to squeeze payment out of the victim.
Where Love Letter’s creator argued the people he’d be targeting wouldn’t suffer for the loss of their login details (already a flawed argument because any virus spreading via email registry is naturally going to jump the tracks and may end up in front of the people he was [in theory] trying to help, not to mention the virus overwriting pictures and documents, both potentially irreplaceable without a backup) ransomware wants said targets to suffer as much as possible, stealing potentially everything on the computer and then locking it until a ransom is paid, because their goal is cash, not logins. Love Letter also had the disadvantage of being of the era where there was not really an easy way to send cash, and therefore no easy way to demand payment; modern day ransomware might luck into your bank details just because you already had it stored on your device. You might have a W-2 or other tax document with your name, address, SSN, and other data on your computer in an unencrypted folder right now!
There’s also no rule saying they have to stop demanding money just because you cooperated and sent them BitCoin. While the ransomware hackers as a whole rely on their reputation of leaving once the money changes hands, it’s not impossible for individuals or groups to break ranks with that expectation and continue to ransom the data they’ve gathered on you, or just sell it onwards after the fact anyway. Honor is not a real consideration here: once the data leaves your device, it’s a toss-up as to what actually happens to it. After all, Love Letter was only after the logins, according to the creator, and yet, there it went, obliterating all of the files on the hard drive seemingly out of pure spite.
Attacks like Love Letter are still incredibly common. After all, if ransomware is already assuming control of the computer, why not grab their email registry on the way out? Social engineering is one of the easier ways to get into a system in today’s age. If you’re afraid of this happening to you, get in touch with us – we can manage software downloads for you and your team, so potentially devastating attacks like these don’t get downloaded in the first place (here! https://elixistechnology.com/contact/)
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/may/05/jamesmeek
