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.

WannaCry 2.0: Indicators of Compromise

WannaCry (WannaCryptor) is becoming probably the most popular cryptolocker in the history of ransomware. It has nothing new in terms of files encryption (RSA + AES using MS CryptoAPI) but uses MS17-010 (a.k.a. ETERNALBLUE named by NSA) vulnerability to propagate itself through local networks using the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol as a network worm resulting in thousands of infections of Windows machines that have not been updated so far.