Mumbai, India, December 18, 2014: ESET research team from Canada has analyzed a widespread case of ransom ware generally known as TorrentLocker, which started spreading in early 2014. The latest variant of the malware has infected at least 40-thousand systems in the last few months targeting primary European countries. ESET’s security research team prepared extensive white paper, presenting all the findings of the investigation and analysis of the malware behavior to gether with blog post are now available on WeLiveSecurity.com.

ESET’s telemetry detects TorrentLocker as Win32/Filecoder.Dl, its name was derived from the registry key used by the malware to store configuration information with the fake name of “Bit Torrent Application” in the beginning of the evolution of this filecoder.

Family of this ransomware encrypts documents, pictures and other files on user’s device and requests ransom to get back access to their files.  Its typical signature is paying ransom solely in crypto-currency – up to 4.081 Bitcoins (1180€ or $1500). In the last campaigns, TorrentLocker has infected 40-thousand systems and encrypted more than 280 million documents in targeted countries mainly from Europe, but addressing also users in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Out of these cases only 570 victims paid the ransom, which has earned the actors behind TorrentLocker the amount of US$585,401 in Bitcoins.

In the white paper ESET researchers have observed and analyzed seven different ways of spreading of the TorrentLocker. According to ESET’s telemetry, first traces of this malware are dated to February 2014. The malware is constantly developing, its most advanced version operating since August 2014

This means that TorrentLocker victims can no longer recover all their documents by combining an encrypted file and its plain text to recover the key stream.