As we predicted in our whitepaper "Your Money or Your Life/Files", there is now shake-and-bake criminal ransomware that aspiring Internet criminals can put together in a few minutes. Meet 'Tox', Ransomware for the rest of us.
In short, you can now go to this TOR website "for criminals by criminals", roll your own ransomware for free, and the site takes a 20% kickback of every Bitcoin ransom payment.
Jim Walter at McAfee Labs commented: "The packaging of malware and malware-construction kits for cybercrime “consumers” has been a long-running trend. Various turnkey kits that cover remote access plus botnet plus stealth functions are available just about anywhere. Ransomware, though very prevalent, has not yet appeared in force in easy-to-deploy kits. But now we have Tox–and it’s free."
Tox is not going to to be the last criminal malware to embrace this model. You can expect new strains, built with more features, better quality and different encryption and evasion methods. This is only the beginning.