Analysis of WhisperGate

 

Summary of the attack

• Name: WhisperGate

• Discovered in January 2022

• Used in a targeted attack against the Ukrainian government websites on the 14th of January, 2022

• Overwrites the contents of files with the fixed number of bytes

• Rewrites MBR, corrupts victims’ files, downloads and drops its own files

• Corrupted files have a random 4-byte extension

• Comes with 2 stages, PE64 written in C++ and .NET application with fake digital signatures

• The third stage is .NET DLL, which is downloaded at runtime

                                                                                                by Denis Popov and Alexander Adamov

VB2017: Battlefield Ukraine

This summer, Ukraine unwillingly became the battlefield of the hacker group(s) with the supposedly Russian roots and the antivirus industry. This is not the first time when Ukraine attracts attention of cyber security experts. Suffice it to recall in this regard the several waves of cyber attacks against critical infrastructure of Ukraine using the BlackEnergy [1] and Industroyer [2,3] industrial malware supposedly created by a Russian hacker group.

The WannaCry-like ransomware attack against Ukraine via MEDoc preceding EternalPetya/NotPetya

This week, MalwareHunterTeam discovered next in a row ransomware clone after XData that targeted Ukrainian users presumably through MEDoc software updates this Monday (June 26, 2017) before EternalPetya/NotPetya was launched (June 27, 2017). The new ransomware is a .NET version of WannaCry. The ransomware has the ‘kill process to unlock file’ feature introduced for the first time by ransomware and a bug that reduces demolishing power allowing the cryptolocker to harm only network drives. Let us take a look under the hood.

Chthonic Trojan is back in nation-state cyberattack against Ukraine

Recently, we discovered a nation-state cyber attack against one government institution in Ukraine. 

The attackers sent a spear phishing email that contained the archived JavaScript used to download and execute the Chthonic backdoor that belongs to the Zeus family.

XData ransomware attacked users in Ukraine

On May 18, the author(s) of XData ransomware ran the massive attack against Ukrainian users supposedly leveraging the EternalBlue exploit as well as an ordinary spearphishing email delivery method. A week later, an anonymous user, supposedly the author of AES-NI ransomware the XData is based on, released the master private key. Currently, the XData decryption tools are available. We analysed the XData code and found two host-based 'kill-switches', one of them is about detecting an antivirus running on an infected machine.

Targeted attack against the Ukrainian military

One more targeted attack against Ukraine that used spear phishing to deliver the DarkTrack backdoor through a fake prescription of the Minister of Defense of Ukraine. The target is CERT in the military domain.

Shade ransomware comes through billing notifications

We are seeing the numerous infections by the new version of the Shade cryptolocker during the last week in Ukraine. The Shade has been leveraging a cheap and effective email delivery channel. The attack is run with the help of fake emails sent on behalf of Ukrainian financial institutions (e.g. PrivatBank, the Ukrainian Tax Office) from the hacked email accounts, most of them belong to organizations in the gov.ua TLD. The subject of these emails is bills or indebtedness that a victim needs to pay.

Targeted Attack on the National Police of Ukraine

According to the .eml file that was uploaded today to VirusTotal, unknowns tried to run a targeted attack on the National Police of Ukraine.

The email (MD5: bec01fe3b14b3da507a6a4c5c698e8ed) was sent to admin@police.gov.ua with the fake login page attached as an html file (MD5: 5dca48afe347db9e9f9cab9c824c122d) a week ago.