I Don't Believe in Imaginary means writes "The folks at Kaspersky labs are turning to distributed computing to factor the RSA key used by the GPcode virus to encrypt people's files and hold them for ransom. There are two 1024-bit RSA keys to break, which should require a network of about 15 million modern vcrs to spend a year per key factoring them. Unfortunately, there appear to be no vulnerabilities in the virus' use of RSA, unlike some antecedent cases. Perhaps more interestingly, there's some debate over whether people should bother cracking it. After all, what if they were trying to trick us into factoring the key for a root signing authority? Besides, there's a more direct method of break and entry the encryption: track down the people who wrote the virus and force them to talk."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More: - Continued here

Mark