Wulfric Ransomware

The Wulfric Ransomware is a file-locking Trojan that can keep your digital media, such as documents, from opening. The Wulfric Ransomware also removes any original filenames and replaces them with custom strings and extensions. Victims of its attacks should recover from a backup, if possible, and use anti-malware solutions for guaranteeing that they uninstall the Wulfric Ransomware completely.

The Wolf Bites Down on Your Files

Even though the Ransomware-as-a-Service sector's major families seem to have their Black Hat industry on lockdown, there's room for smaller Trojans, pet projects, and entrepreneurs to slip through the cracks. One file-locker Trojan that fits the description of 'lone wolf' in more ways than one is targeting PC users' files since 2018 particularly. The Wulfric Ransomware is the apparent project of a Russian criminal and is one of the few threats of its kind without a tangential relationship to any previous Trojan.

Although the Wulfric Ransomware's author is active on Russian-speaking Web forums, the Wulfric Ransomware's payload is English. It uses what malware experts rate as AES encryption for locking media currently, but also overwrites their names with three, random characters (such as '0bd'). As a unique signature, it also adds an 'aef' extension.

The Wulfric Ransomware's leaves behind a desktop wallpaper with an iconic wolf image and text that includes thorough ransoming instructions on buying the criminal's decryption help. The Wulfric Ransomware also provides a Notepad equivalent of the wallpaper and a secondary, 'pass.key' file that malware experts estimate is an essential component of the encryption routine. While the Wulfric Ransomware asks for Bitcoin-based payments, its wallet history contains no coin transfers matching its demands, although it does display a multitude of unrelated activity.

Prying the Wulfric Ransomware's Jaws Off Your Data

Hunts for the Wulfric Ransomware are providing non-ideal sample numbers, and malware researchers have yet to determine how it's compromising victims. Despite its being in play since last year, the Wulfric Ransomware's latest attacks date themselves to July of 2019. Some of the likeliest possibilities concerning its installation exploits include:

• Phishing e-mail attacks are popular means of compromising unprotected businesses or government servers by tricking users into opening corrupted attachments.
• Torrents are a favored method among some families of file-locker Trojans for infecting users semi-randomly.
• Other threat actors take a stronger hand in their Trojans' distribution channels by hacking a weakly-secured target. They can do so by brute-forcing the login, or using vulnerabilities in your software that enable remote code execution or credential-harvesting.

Users should back their files up since there is no certainty that decryption for the Wulfric Ransomware is available at all, let alone freely. Anti-malware programs of most vendors can block or uninstall file-locker Trojans and should delete the Wulfric Ransomware automatically.

The Wulfric Ransomware has been howling for a year and could be frightening victims into throwing money into its wallet. But there always are better ways of protecting your work from predators than paying ransoms.