The BianLian gang has abandoned its strategy of encrypting files and demanding a ransom in favour of outright extortion.
Avast, a cybersecurity company, released a free decryptor for BianLian victims in January, which appears to have persuaded the criminals that extortion was the only viable option rather than the ransomware business.
Threat analysts for cybersecurity firm Redacted stated in a report that BianLian is increasingly choosing to forgo encrypting victims’ data and instead concentrate on persuading victims to pay solely using an extortion demand in exchange for BianLian’s silence, as opposed to the typical double-extortion model of encrypting files and threatening to leak data.
Several ransomware organisations are starting to depend less on data encryption and more on extortion. Yet, it appears that that Avast tool served as the catalyst for this gang’s action.