Poll of the Day > my wife got ransomware on her computer.

(+) Yeah! (+)

what part of "it encrypted image files" makes you think it didn't encrypt them
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helIy posted...

what part of "it encrypted image files" makes you think it didn't encrypt them

So you didn't get your image files back?

they're backed up to one drive, so them being encrypted locally don't really matter
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WarGreymon77 posted...

I don't understand this. With today's technology, there's got to be something that can fix that.

you have it backwards. "with today's technology" you can irretrievably encrypt things. this is why this kind of malware is so scary.

http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/3043/how-much-computing-resource-is-required-to-brute-force-rsa

the search space of RSA-1024 is about 1.9x10^302
the number of atoms in the universe is about 10^80
as the answer above states, even if every atom in the universe was a computer that tested one possibility every millisecond it would still take ~6x10^211 years to brute force. (the current age of the universe is only ~13.75x10^9).
(and this is for 1024-bit, with each bit past that doubling the complexity, and it's expandable to 4096+)

(mind, this is to brute-force when normally you'd use some kind of exploit to lower the time it takes)
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helIy posted...

with locky, probably the most common encryption ransomware, it stores the encryption key locally because it doesn't contact a server anymore to retrieve it.

well, then it's not as bad as it could be then
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man, I remember trying to brute force things
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Sahuagin posted...

WarGreymon77 posted...

I don't understand this. With today's technology, there's got to be something that can fix that.

you have it backwards. "with today's technology" you can irretrievably encrypt things. this is why this kind of malware is so scary.

http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/3043/how-much-computing-resource-is-required-to-brute-force-rsa

the search space of RSA-1024 is about 1.9x10^302
the number of atoms in the universe is about 10^80
as the answer above states, even if every atom in the universe was a computer that tested one possibility every millisecond it would still take ~6x10^211 years to brute force. (the current age of the universe is only ~13.75x10^9).

(mind, this is to brute-force when normally you'd use some kind of exploit to lower the time it takes)

and yet, they've obviously found a way to defeat that if the NSA still exists, and continues sucking up all the data despite encryption.
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WhiskeyDisk posted...

and yet, they've obviously found a way to defeat that if the NSA still exists, and continues sucking up all the data despite encryption.

well, your assumption there is that the NSA has 100% access to all data... that is not necessarily true, why do you assume that?

but as far as I know, the US government has secret dealings with Microsoft, providing backdoors into Windows and other shady things that we can only guess at. they don't get around it with magic, they get around it with subterfuge.
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