{"id":129,"date":"2014-02-22T19:52:40","date_gmt":"2014-02-22T19:52:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lapsedordinary.net\/?p=129"},"modified":"2014-02-22T19:52:40","modified_gmt":"2014-02-22T19:52:40","slug":"researchers-crack-bitcrypt-ransomware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lapsed.ordinary\/2014\/02\/22\/researchers-crack-bitcrypt-ransomware\/","title":{"rendered":"Researchers crack Bitcrypt ransomware"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are 256 (2<sup>8<\/sup>) different bytes and only ten different digits. So if your secret (RSA) key consists of 128 digits rather than of 128 bytes, the entropy of the key (that is, the amount of &#8216;surprise&#8217; to an attacker) is a whole lot lower.<br \/>\nNo shit, Sherlock. Apparently, this somewhat basic fact was beyond the understanding of those who wrote the Bitcrypt ransomware, probably inspired by the sad success story of CryptoLocker. In practise, it meant the difference between &#8220;only the NSA can crack your key&#8221; and &#8220;anyone can crack your key&#8221;. Two researchers from <i>Airbus<\/i> cracked the key and thus were able to restore the encrypted files on a friend&#8217;s computer, without paying the 0.4BTC ransom.<br \/>\nMore at <i>Virus Bulletin<\/i> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.virusbtn.com\/blog\/2014\/02_21.xml\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are 256 (28) different bytes and only ten different digits. So if your secret (RSA) key consists of 128 digits rather than of 128 bytes, the entropy of the key (that is, the amount of &#8216;surprise&#8217; to an attacker) is a whole lot lower. No shit, Sherlock. Apparently, this somewhat basic fact was beyond [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[17,57,120,155],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lapsed.ordinary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lapsed.ordinary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lapsed.ordinary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lapsed.ordinary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lapsed.ordinary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/lapsed.ordinary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lapsed.ordinary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lapsed.ordinary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lapsed.ordinary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}