Malware appears to have hijacked the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP)'s
website – and held it to ransom.
The front page of the site has been replaced with instructions on how to pay off the extortionists: $150 (£100) in Bitcoin must be coughed up by February 22, or the association's web data will remain scrambled forever. The malware,
CTB-Locker, encrypts files on infected machines, and then demands payment for the decryption key. Without this key, the contents of the documents are useless.
BACP, based in Leicester, describes itself as "the largest professional body representing counselling and psychotherapy in the UK," and is said to have more than 40,000 members. So far, the ransom has not been paid: the crooks' Bitcoin
wallet is empty and no currency has been moved from it.
What's puzzling to us is that CTB-Locker is known to be a Windows software nasty that is typically installed by accidentally opening a spam email attachment or browsing a malicious website. Yet, BACP.co.uk appears to be powered by Linux, probably kernel version 2.6.32 to 2.6.35.
