Elitebot Ransomware (. Bot File) — Removal Guide

What is known about the Elitebotvirus?

The scheme of renaming is this: [victimID].[contact_email].bot. In the course of encryption, a file named, for instance, “report.docx” will be renamed to “report.docx.[2AF20FA3].[].bot”.

In each folder with the encoded files, a +README-WARNING+.txt text document will appear. It is a ransom money note. It contains information about the ways of contacting the racketeers and some other information. The ransom note usually contains a description of how to purchase the decryption tool from the racketeers. You can obtain this decryptor after contacting through email. That is how they do it.

The +README-WARNING+.txt document accompanying the Elitebot malware states the following:

I ASK YOU to read this MESSAGE to the end, so as not to miss the details

Good afternoon, my name is ELITEBOT.
Your files on the server are fine, please don\'t worry.

First of all, I am the same person as you, but we are on different sides of earning methods.
I don\'t want you to lose files, databases or that valuable data would leak to the Internet.

 Therefore, I offer you an honest cooperation, after which everyone will get what he wants.
I will reveal the details and problems of protecting your network.
I will give you security tips that will help you become more protected from external factors.
I will restore all files to their original working state.

Let me give you back everything that was blocked.
 But to do this, minimize attempts to restore with your own hands, this causes
irreparable harm in 90% of cases, after which recovery is impossible.

I hope you will not take it openly hostile, this is life and you need to learn from mistakes.

As a demonstration, I am ready to restore 1-3 files of up to 10mb in different formats to you.

The price of restoration is not high and NEGOTIABLE
I think that with calm communication we will find mutual understanding and the right way out.

If you still have questions, please write to the mail -  - if I do not answer you within 24 hours, please write to the emergency email - 


Telegram (Temporary): hxxps://
hxxps:// - id client (-)
Request a demo video of the recovery in the telegram or by mail

In the picture below, you can see what a directory with files encrypted by the Elitebot looks like. Each filename has the “.bot” extension added to it.

How did Elitebot ransomware end up on my PC?

There are currently three most popular methods for hackers to have the Elitebot virus working in your system. These are email spam, Trojan injection and peer-to-peer networks.

If you access your inbox and see letters that look just like notifications from utility services providers, postal agencies like FedEx, web-access providers, and whatnot, but whose sender is unknown to you, be wary of opening those emails. They are most likely to have a ransomware item attached to them. So it is even riskier to open any attachments that come with emails like these.

Another thing the hackers might try is a Trojan file model³. A Trojan is an object that infiltrates into your computer pretending to be something legal. Imagine, you download an installer for some program you need or an update for some service. But what is unboxed reveals itself a harmful agent that corrupts your data. Since the installation package can have any name and any icon, you’d better be sure that you can trust the resource of the stuff you’re downloading. The best thing is to trust the software developers’ official websites.

As for the peer-to-peer networks like torrents or eMule, the danger is that they are even more trust-based than the rest of the Internet. You can never know what you download until you get it. So you’d better be using trustworthy websites. Also, it is a good idea to scan the folder containing the downloaded files with the anti-malware utility as soon as the downloading is done.