I fully understand that Boinc! is primarily a scientific tool and long may that continue, but wouldn't it be nice if we could dedicate some of our processing power to brute force a file a member of the public has submitted as they are held ransom by cyber criminals?

Cryptolocker is a real menace and uses 1024-bit RSA encryption and the private key doesn't exist on the victims computer, not in the memory or the hard drive. Only supercomputers will decrypt the files in reasonable time meaning the public are held to ransom to pay €300 for the private key. Each PC that fell prey to this attack needs a unique private key to decrypt the files.

That is where we come in. We have the required horsepower, more than enough in fact. Isn't there anybody out there who can work with Berkeley University, AMD and nVidia to get a decryptor working with Boinc? A website where a victim can upload just one of the encrypted files and then it is added to the queue and our PCs will begin the brute force method?

The beauty of Boinc is the ecosystem in place can tell how many people participate in the project, and thus that will instruct different processors to try a different range. When one of us cracks it, it gets sent back as successful... if we fail, it gets sent back and that range for that file is struck off and need not be attempted again so a new range is issued.

By the way, Cryptolocker is the daddy of malware right now. It is big news. The creators are banking on the idea nobody will have a nuke to blitz it, well guess what, we have that nuke and it is now a bleeding powerful one! When we crack the key the site that Berkeley created for submitted files will tell that person it is mission successful and give them the key they need to unlock their files and not have to pay the criminals.

The whole project can even evolve, working against future variations created by different authors. Now that would be a promotion, that sort of Boinc project would be global news!!

That would likely require distributing the encrypted file to all client computers, something the original owner might not be comfortable with considering that (hopefully) at least one of them is going to find the right key and decrypt the file.

Also, it seems like a lot of work when a good backup would remove the need for decrypting the files in the first place.

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My Detailed BOINC Stats

Aye, back how would be great. However my experience amongst users even in an office environment are not computer literate enough to understand that.