‘Rensenware’ Malware Encrypts Your Data, Forces You To Play Bullet Hell Game To Get It Back

Malware, in all of its forms, is designed to be a nuisance, and sometimes destructive. But of all of the different forms of malware out there, one of the most infuriating has got to be “ransomware” – malicious software designed to score a quick buck for its creator.

In many ransomware cases, user data is immediately encrypted with a key only accessible by the malware creator (or sometimes, no one at all), at which point a prompt would give the now-confused user instructions on how to get their data back. Often, it’s a matter of paying a fee, generally with Bitcoin, but other times, the demand could be off-the-wall bizarre, such as with “Rensenware”.

Rensenware is the creation of a Korean undergraduate who decided to code it up as a bit of a joke. Like regular ransomware, user data is encrypted, but unlike regular ransomware, Rensenware forces the user to set a high score in a “bullet hell” game called Touhou Seirensen. The big problem here is that this particular bullet hell game lives up to the genre’s name, so even gamers who excel at these games would be given an impossible task. Better still: Rensenware looks to have been designed to detect cheats.

After the creator finalized this ridiculous project, he uploaded it to GitHub and called it a day. The following day, he somehow managed to infect himself with his own malware, giving us the proof-of-concept we all needed. But as humorous as this is, though, because the code was uploaded to GitHub, chances are good that others now have it and could wreak their own havoc. Great.

Let’s hope this undergraduate isn’t aiming to become a computer security expert.