RensomWare Holds Your Files Hostage Until You Beat a High Score

Malware is generally a nasty thing and ransomware is probably one of the worst kind. In most instances, ransomware will hold your files hostage until you pay the bad guys to release them, but a new and different approach recently popped up. RensonWare, as it’s called, will hold your files hostage until you beat a nearly impossible score in a Anime shoot-em-up game.

RensenWare, named after shoot-’em-up Touhou Seirensen – Undefined Fantastic Object, forces PC owners to take on the game’s Lunatic level to free their files. You’ll need to score at least 200 million points or you lose your stuff forever. Now, that’s different and a bit of a weird twist on an old concept.

Found a surprising ransomware today: "rensenWare".
Not asks for any money, but to play a game until you reach a score – and it's not a joke. pic.twitter.com/Pu53WZFALA

— MalwareHunterTeam (@malwrhunterteam) April 6, 2017

However, there is a reason for this weird ransomware. It was developed by a Korea-based undergraduate student as a joke and from there it got a little out-of-hand. The creator shared his work on GitHub and from there it made its way into the real world, infecting computers for real.

There is a bit of good news too. As it all was generated to be a joke or experiment, the creator released a bypass that will unlock your files by adding the needed value to the memory. The creator also issued an apology for any harm it might have done in the meantime.

So, the creator of rensenWare created a tool which writes the values to memory which are needed for the decryption.
Also wrote an apology… pic.twitter.com/LrapKv5Dm3

— MalwareHunterTeam (@malwrhunterteam) April 7, 2017

The below text is the official Apology. It isn’t written with the best use of the English language, but it should be easy enough to understand:

“Embarrasing, but I decided to do what I must.

First of all, I’d like to apologise everyone for making shocked, or annoyed. ransomeware is definitely kind of highly-fatal malware, but I made it. I made it for joke, and just laughing with people who like Touhou Project Series. So I distributed source code except compiled binary on the web, however, at the point of the distribution, the tragedy was beginning.

Maybe it’s okay if I remove the encryption/decryption logic before I distribute the source code, then rensenWare can be treated kind of joke program. But I didn’t.

A number of people blamed me. It’s natural, because I made accident definitely wrong.

So I pulled down the source code of the rensenWare from the GitHub, and made this tool. I hope this tool can help the ones who are already affected by rensenWare.

Once again, I apology to everyone. I’m really sorry.

P.S. I’m not sure this apology is enough to you. If not, then I apologise again in this post Script. It didn’t meant to be evil. I hope you understand of it.”