Skip to main content

Email scam Petya locks down PCs until a ransom is paid

NotPetya ransomware
Trend Micro
A new piece of malware doing the rounds using popular cloud storage service Dropbox as its carrier is reportedly able to lock users out of their systems. The ransomware is known as Petya, and at present it seems to be forcing users to pay more than $400 to regain access to their computers.

Petya is being distributed via email, according to a report from Trend Micro. The package is included in correspondence intended to look like a message from a professional looking for work, which contains a Dropbox link that will supposedly allow the recipient to download their resume.

Recommended Videos

Unfortunately, that file is in fact a self-extracting executable that’s designed to install a Trojan which blocks any active security software and downloads the Petya ransomware. Once that groundwork has all been laid, the real attack can get underway.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Petya overwrites the master boot record of the infected system, causing a blue screen of death. Once the user tries to reboot, they’ll be greeted with a bright red screen emblazoned with an ASCII skull and crossbones — and there’s no way of escaping this, as safe mode will have already been disabled.

The ransomware then informs the user that their system has been locked with a “military-grade encryption algorithm.” The only way to reverse the process is to head to the dark Web and pay for a key with bitcoin — the going rate is $431, and that figure doubles if the victim doesn’t pay within a certain schedule.

This is undoubtedly a very nasty piece of malware, and another piece of evidence that online criminals are continually developing their methods of attack. At present, it’s unclear what individuals can do to avoid being targeted, aside from being continually vigilant about the sort of links they click on in emails from unknown senders.

Brad Jones
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Brad is an English-born writer currently splitting his time between Edinburgh and Pennsylvania. You can find him on Twitter…
Big tech is dominating my digital life — here’s how I fixed it
big tech logos around capitol hill

Big tech companies are so dominant and so far-reaching right now that people could probably live their entire digital lives interacting only with Google, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon products. Things never got quite that bad for me but I did realize recently that I've been relying far too much on Google, plus I’ve been using Safari for years even though I don’t actually like it that much.

So I decided to find some new apps to try out and came across a nice resource full of European, open-source, or non-profit alternatives for a range of different services. It introduced me to quite a few apps that are more than good enough to replace what I was using, and although I’m not hardcore enough to completely kick Google out of my life, I’m pretty happy with the results.
What’s so bad about big tech?

Read more
Meta faces lawsuit for training AI with pirated books
A silhouetted person holds a smartphone displaying the Facebook logo. They are standing in front of a sign showing the Meta logo.

In a recent lawsuit, Meta has been accused of using pirated books to train its AI models, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg's approval. As per Ars Technica, the lawsuit filed by authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates and Sarah Silverman in a California federal court, cite internal Meta communications indicating that the company utilized the Library Genesis (LibGen) dataset—a vast online repository known for hosting pirated books—despite internal concerns about the legality of using such material.

The authors argue that Meta's actions infringe upon their copyrights and could undermine the company's position with regulators. They claim that Meta's AI models, including Llama, were trained using their works without permission, potentially harming their livelihoods. Meta has defended its practices by invoking the "fair use" doctrine, asserting that using publicly available materials to train AI tools is legal in certain cases, such as "using text to statistically model language and generate original expression."

Read more
Intel needed a win — its new laptop CPU delivers just that
An MSI laptop sitting on a table.

It feels cliche at this point, but it's true. Intel can't catch a break. The new Arrow Lake-H chips feel like a tide shift for Team Blue, though, leveraging the highly efficient architectures the company debuted with Lunar Lake to deliver performance and battery life worthy of the best laptops on the market.
By the numbers
We've already seen what Intel's Lunar Lake processors are capable of -- read our Asus Zenbook S 14 review for more on that -- but these new Arrow Lake-H offerings are a bit different. Under the hood, Intel is still using its Lion Cove and Skymont core architectures, which Arrow Lake-H shares with Lunar Lake. However, these chips get a larger core count, higher power budget, and beefier integrated graphics based on Intel's Battlemage architecture.

The power budget is really important here. The base power is 45W, but Intel allows the chip to boost up to 115W for short periods of time. The core split is interesting, too. You get 16 total cores, but they're split between six performance cores, eight efficient cores, and two low-power efficient cores. If you remember, the efficient cores are actually the main performance driver in this architecture, so the extra two low-power ones are simply there for a little extra multi-core grunt.

Read more