Lazarus on the hunt for big game

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We may only be six months in, but there’s little doubt that 2020 will go down in history as a rather unpleasant year. In the field of cybersecurity, the collective hurt mostly crystallized around the increasing prevalence of targeted ransomware attacks. By investigating a number of these incidents and through discussions with some of our trusted industry partners, we feel that we now have a good grasp on how the ransomware ecosystem is structured.

Criminals piggyback on widespread botnet infections (for instance, the infamous Emotet and Trickbot malware families) to spread into the network of promising victims and license ransomware “products” from third-party developers. When the attackers have a good understanding of the target’s finances and IT processes, they deploy the ransomware on all the company’s assets and enter the negotiation phase.

This ecosystem operates in independent, highly specialized clusters, which in most cases have no links to each other beyond their business ties. This is why the concept of threat actors gets fuzzy: the group responsible for the initial breach is unlikely to be the party that compromised the victim’s Active Directory server, which in turn is not the one that wrote the actual ransomware code used during the incident. What’s more, over the course of two incidents, the same criminals may switch business partners and could be leveraging different botnet and/or ransomware families altogether.

But of course, no complex ecosystem could ever be described by a single, rigid set of rules and this one is no exception. In this blog post, we describe one of these outliers over two separate investigations that occurred between March and May 2020.

Case #1: The VHD ransomware

This first incident occurred in Europe and caught our attention for two reasons: it features a ransomware family we were unaware of, and involved a spreading technique reminiscent of APT groups (see the “spreading utility” details below). The ransomware itself is nothing special: it’s written in C++ and crawls all connected disks to encrypt files and delete any folder called “System Volume Information” (which are linked to Windows’ restore point feature). The program also stops processes that could be locking important files, such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server. Files are encrypted with a combination of AES-256 in ECB mode and RSA-2048. In our initial report published at the time we noted two peculiarities with this program’s implementation:

• The ransomware uses Mersenne Twister as a source of randomness, but unfortunately for the victims the RNG is reseeded every time new data is consumed. Still, this is unorthodox cryptography, as is the decision to use the “electronic codebook” (ECB) mode for the AES algorithm. The combination of ECB and AES is not semantically secure, which means the patterns of the original clear data are preserved upon encryption. This was reiterated by cybersecurity researchers who analyzed Zoom security in April 2020.
  
• VHD implements a mechanism to resume operations if the encryption process is interrupted. For files larger than 16MB, the ransomware stores the current cryptographic materials on the hard drive, in clear text. This information is not deleted securely afterwards, which implies there may be a chance to recover some of the files.
  

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Additional Info: https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/lazarus-v...are/36559/