The Evolution of Ransomware - from Floppies to Droppers
summary
Timeline traces ransomware from the 1989 AIDS Trojan that ships on 10,000 floppy disks, demands $378 in cashier’s checks to a Panama PO box and uses a simple symmetric substitution cipher that destroys researchers’ data, to GPCode (2006) with 330→660→1024-bit escalation, to CryptoLocker (2013) riding the Zeus botnet and Bitcoin payments. Adds are screen lockers (2010), SMS premium fraud and late‑2010s data exfiltration, showing delivery vectors still vary while encryption and monetization become robust.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:47History
- 5:19Delivery
- 10:34Encryption
- 11:54Screenlockers
- 15:41GPCode
- 18:00decryption
- 18:55exfiltration
- 19:25business model
- 19:57prepaid debit
- 20:44electronic currencies
- 21:28SMS and premium calls
- 22:31Crypto Locker
- 23:24Zeus
- 24:24Floppies
- 27:26The 2000s
- 30:54The Delivery
- 31:36Conclusion
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