Day: February 28, 2015

Kevin Tang took me up on my offer to add more content to Yiffy Times, and from time to time will be submitting new material.

DIVERGENT (2014)
Director: Neil Burger
Writers: Veronica Roth, Evan Daugherty, Vanessa Taylor
Main Cast: Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Ashley Judd, Jai Courtney, Ray Stevenson, Kate Winslet
REVIEW:
On the 11th of April, 2014, a new dystopian film was released and it was called Divergent. Many critics have acclaimed it to be the best movie of 2014 and it’s “better than the book”.

What makes the film so good is in the characters’ costumes. In the story, civlians are either sent to their ‘faction’ or ‘factionless’. The people whom are factionless have appearals like the homelesses whilst the people whom are in their own factions are giving tidy clothings. This showed the severeness of the disparity between those who obey the totalitarian political system and those who don’t, thus bringing out the theme of the story, “What makes you different, makes you dangerous.”

The movie includes an elite of musicians and artists that makes the film score different from most of other films, including artists like BANKS, Woodkid, and Ellie Goulding. For example, when Tris has to get on the train, a fast paced background music plays. This matches with Tris’ nervousness and the metal sound effects in the music makes it more fitting to the surroundings, because metal symbolizes the strength of Tris.

The shock value in the film also made it to be critics’ highly acclaimed movie. For example, when Eric pushes Christina from the bridge after Eric sympathized Christina, the scene shocked the whole audience. Another notable scene is when Four threw knifes at Tris. The director used close-ups and and sudden fast-paced film scores to present the nervousness to the audience.

Although some shocking scenes did present the professionality of the actors, the characters heavily relied on external factors like the music and sound effects. For example, when Four told Tris to train how to conquer fears in his mind, Tris’ face and feels emotionless. And when Tris entered her ‘fear landscape’, she did not present any fear, but rather an emotionless face. The scene made the audience nervous because of the music accompanied along with the faded colours.

Despite of the little flaws mentioned above, Divergent is overall an exciting and stunning movie.

by Kelvin Tang (23/8/2014)

A new ransomware called TeslaCrypt was discovered by Fabian Wosar of Emsisoft that encrypts your files using AES encryption and then demands a ransom payment in order to decrypt your files. What makes TeslaCrypt different than other ransomware is its attempt to cash in on the $81 billion game market by placing a strong emphasis on encrypting video game related files. Unlike other ransomware that typically target images, documents, videos, and applications databases, TeslaCrypt also targets over 40 different video game related files. The game files being targeted belong to games such as RPG Maker, Call of Duty, Dragon Age, StarCraft, MineCraft, World of Warcraft, World of Tanks, and Steam.

Another major difference with this ransomware is that for the first time this type of infection not only accepts bitcoins as a ransom payment, but also accepts PayPal My Cash cards. PayPal My Cash cards are cards that can be purchased at popular US store chains and then filled with money that can then be transferred to a PayPal account using the PIN on the card. Paying the ransom with PayPal My Cash cards, though, comes at a premium of $1,000, while paying the ransom with bitcoins is half that price at $500 USD. This higher price for using the Cash cards is probably due to the higher risk of the illegal gains being confiscated by PayPal.

At this point it is unknown as to how TeslaCrypt is distributed, but once a computer is infected it will scan all drives on a computer and encrypt certain file types using AES encryption. Any files that are encrypted will have the .ecc extension added to the end of the filename. The file types encrypted by the TeslaCrypt ransomware are:

.7z;.rar;.m4a;.wma;.avi;.wmv;.csv;.d3dbsp;.sc2save;.sie;.sum;.ibank;.t13;.t12;.qdf;.gdb;.tax;.pkpass;.bc6;.bc7;.bkp;.qic;.bkf;.sidn;.sidd;.mddata;.itl;.itdb;.icxs;.hvpl;.hplg;.hkdb;.mdbackup;.syncdb;.gho;.cas;.svg;.map;.wmo;.itm;.sb;.fos;.mcgame;.vdf;.ztmp;.sis;.sid;.ncf;.menu;.layout;.dmp;.blob;.esm;.001;.vtf;.dazip;.fpk;.mlx;.kf;.iwd;.vpk;.tor;.psk;.rim;.w3x;.fsh;.ntl;.arch00;.lvl;.snx;.cfr;.ff;.vpp_pc;.lrf;.m2;.mcmeta;.vfs0;.mpqge;.kdb;.db0;.DayZProfile;.rofl;.hkx;.bar;.upk;.das;.iwi;.litemod;.asset;.forge;.ltx;.bsa;.apk;.re4;.sav;.lbf;.slm;.bik;.epk;.rgss3a;.pak;.big;.unity3d;.wotreplay;.xxx;.desc;.py;.m3u;.flv;.js;.css;.rb;.png;.jpeg;.txt;.p7c;.p7b;.p12;.pfx;.pem;.crt;.cer;.der;.x3f;.srw;.pef;.ptx;.r3d;.rw2;.rwl;.raw;.raf;.orf;.nrw;.mrwref;.mef;.erf;.kdc;.dcr;.cr2;.crw;.bay;.sr2;.srf;.arw;.3fr;.dng;.jpe;.jpg;.cdr;.indd;.ai;.eps;.pdf;.pdd;.psd;.dbfv;.mdf;.wb2;.rtf;.wpd;.dxg;.xf;.dwg;.pst;.accdb;.mdb;.pptm;.pptx;.ppt;.xlk;.xlsb;.xlsm;.xlsx;.xls;.wps;.docm;.docx;.doc;.odb;.odc;.odm;.odp;.ods;.odt;Unlike other ransomware, TeslaCrypt pays peculiar attention to files used by popular games such as Dragon Age, Call of Duty, StarCraft 2, RPG Maker, World of Warcraft, World of Tanks, Minecraft, DayZ, and League of Legends. This targeting of video game related files is a new development in ransomware. Once all of your data has been encrypted, it will run the following command to delete all Shadow Volume Copies and restore points from your computer. This is done so you are unable to restore your data from System Restore Points.

vssadmin delete shadows /allFinally, the ransomware will change your Desktop wallpaper to a ransom note and create another ransom note called HELP_TO_DECRYPT_YOUR_FILES.txt on your desktop. A lock screen will then appear that explains your data was encrypted and that you have 3 days to make payment. This lock screen contains buttons that allow you to check whether a payment has been accepted, the ability to enter your decryption keys, and a link to a TOR payment site where you can perform a free file decryption as a test.

TeslaCrypt’s TOR site provides instructions on how you can make your ransom payment in bitcoins or PayPal My Cash Cards. The site also allows you to decrypt one file for free to prove that they can indeed decrypt your files. Last, but not least, the site includes a message system that allows a victim to communicate privately with the malware developers.

Unfortunately, at this time there is no known method of decrypting your files for free. As always we recommend that you do not pay the ransom if you can avoid it. Instead restore files from a backup or try restoring your files using Shadow Explorer or with a file recovery tool like R-Studio, Photorec, or Recuva. None of these restoration methods are guaranteed to work, but it is worth trying as people have reported success with malware like TeslaCrypt in the past.