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March 2017, Vol. 19, No. 2

Doxware: New ransomware threat, or just extortionware rebranded?

The easiest way to scare enterprises these days is to announce a new ransomware threat, but experts are unsure if doxware is a worrying new ransomware trend or a rebranding of extortionware. On the surface, doxware and extortionware seem to be the same thing: malware variants that combine the data hostage threat of ransomware with the added threat of exposing the data publicly -- instead of keeping it encrypted indefinitely -- if the ransom isn't paid. So, in the eyes of many experts, the two terms can and have been used interchangeably. "There does not appear to be a difference between this and what we have traditionally called extortionware," Casey Ellis, CEO of Bugcrowd, based in San Francisco, told SearchSecurity. "It appears that this simply has a way cooler name." John Bambenek, threat systems manager at Fidelis Cybersecurity, based in Bethesda, Md., said there was value in better branding of security threats. "Every few years, there seems to be a change in how we refer to threats," Bambenek told SearchSecurity. "Part of ...

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