Kaspersky Lab says victims of new ransomware not to get files back

MOSCOW, Jun 29 (PRIME) -- Victims of a new ransomware virus, which hit 2,000 users mostly in Russia and Ukraine and was tagged as ExPetr by Kaspersky Lab, will not be able to get their infected files back, the Russian antivirus program maker said late on Wednesday.

“The analysis conducted by our experts revealed that from the very beginning victims had had no chances to get their files back. Kaspersky Lab’s researchers studied the part of the malware code that is linked to file encoding and found out that as soon as a disk is encrypted, creators of the virus have no option to decode it,” Kaspersky Lab said.

According to earlier reports, hackers demanded U.S. $300 in bitcoins to decode infected files.

The global ransomware attack hit IT systems of companies in several countries of the world on Tuesday. The assault targeted oil, power, telecom, and pharmaceutical firms.

Slovakia-headquartered antivirus maker ESET said earlier that the ransomware virus was distributed via an update for accounting software M.E.Doc, which is widely used by Ukrainian companies and banks.

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