What is Blackout Ransomware?
If Blackout Ransomware enters your system, you might lose most of your personal data. The malicious application is a file-encrypting threat that locks photographs, images, videos, text documents, and other data created or placed by the user. The files should be enciphered with a secure cryptosystem, so to decrypt them you would need a decryption key and a decryptor. Unfortunately, these tools are available only to the cyber criminals who developed Blackout Ransomware. They may try to convince you to purchase them for a particular sum of Bitcoins, but you should keep in mind there are no guarantees they can or will keep up to their promises. Thus, we urge users not to trust the hackers and simply get rid of the malware. For this reason, our researchers at Anti-spyware-101.com have prepared deletion instructions available at the end of the text, but before scrolling below, you should read more about the threat to learn how to avoid it next time.
Where does Blackout Ransomware come from?
Blackout Ransomware could travel with infected installers, fake updates, or malicious email attachments. Therefore, if you have no idea how it was able to enter your system, you should suspect files that were downloaded and launched the same day your computer appeared to be infected. The malware’s launcher could have a random name, and it may not necessarily be executable; meaning, it might be any recently received file. To avoid such mistakes the next time, you should pay more attention to the data you receive from suspicious sources. For additional protection, our researchers recommend keeping a legitimate antimalware tool installed as it might be able to identify the threat and warn the user before it can do any harm. Speaking of protection of files located on the computer, it would be advisable to regularly backup all valuable files to have their copies in case the originals get destroyed.
How does Blackout Ransomware work?
The moment you launch the malware, it might kill the Task Manager’s process and block it until it finishes encrypting user’s valuable data. It would seem the malicious application does not need to create any copies of itself or other new files on the system, so the encryption process should start immediately as well. During it, the targeted data becomes enciphered with a secure encryption algorithm called AES. The enciphered files’ titles could become locked too as the names might be replaced with twenty-four random characters (e.g. NV7nLNMsXCJyrFK2LbB6XWs@). Luckily, Blackout Ransomware does not target files belonging to the operating system, so the computer should work normally even if it gets infected. However, files located in the USERPROFILE%, %ALLUSERSPROFILE%, and %PUBLIC% folders or their subfolders should become unusable.
The next thing we noticed about the infection while testing it is that it may create files with titles consisting of words “read me” written together and random twelve characters separated by a couple of underscores (e.g. README_8962357_96654.txt). The text inside the document is called a ransom note. As you can imagine it contains demands and instructions from the hackers. The interesting part is that they claim the software is not a malicious application, but a helpful one. It is probably a way to convince the users to contact the cyber criminals. Then they would probably offer to purchase the unique decryption key and a decryptor or in other words, pay a ransom. Just like we said at the beginning, there are no reassurances the promised tools will be delivered, so naturally, we are against paying the ransom.
How to get rid of Blackout Ransomware?
As the instructions available below explain, to remove Blackout Ransomware one should kill the malicious application’s process if it is still running and then delete its launcher. The ransom notes might be scattered in various locations, and they will have to be erased manually as well. If this process appears to be too much for you to handle, you could install a legitimate antimalware tool and allow it to eliminate the malware for you. The best part is that this way you would have the opportunity to clean the system from other possible threats too and the tool could help you protect the PC from future threats.
Remove Blackout Ransomware from system
- Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete.
- Open Task Manager.
- Check if the malicious application’s process is still running and kill it while clicking End Task.
- Close the Task Manager.
- Press Windows key+E.
- Go to directories where the malware’s launcher could have been saved, e.g. %TEMP%, %USERPROFILE%\desktop, %USERPROFILE%\downloads, etc.
- Identify the infection’s launcher, right-click it, and press Delete.
- Erase all ransom notes (e.g. README_8962357_96654.txt).
- Exit the Explorer.
- Empty your Recycle bin.
- Restart the PC.
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