On Thursday of last week (June 29th 2017), just after writing about EternalPetya, we discovered that the user-mode file encryption-decryption mechanism would be functional, provided a victim could obtain the correct key from the malware’s author. Here’s a description of how that mechanism works. EternalPetya malware uses the standard Win32 crypto API to encrypt data. […]

Following up on our post from yesterday, as an intellectual thought experiment, let’s take the position that there’s something to the idea of (Eternal) Petya not being motivated by money/profit. Let’s also just go ahead and imagine that it’s been developed by a nation state. In my mind, it raises the following question: WTF WHY? […]

In our previous post about Petya, we speculated that the short-cuts, design flaws, and non-functional mechanisms observed in the  malware could have arisen due to it being developed under a tight deadline. I’d now like to elaborate a little on what we meant by that. As a recap, this is what the latest version of Petya […]

There’s been a lot of speculation and conjecture around this “Petya” outbreak. A great deal of it seems to have been fueled by confirmation bias (to us, at least). Many things about this malware don’t add up (at first glance). But it wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. And yet everyone seems to have […]

Let’s take a moment to collect what we know about WannaCry (W32/WCry) and what we can learn from it. When looked at from a technical perspective, WCry (in its two binary components) has the following properties. Comprised of two Windows binaries. mssecsvc.exe: a worm that handles spreading and drops the payload. tasksche.exe: a ransomware trojan […]

WCry, WannaCry, Wana Decrypt0r. I’m sure at this point you’ve heard something about what the industry has dubbed the largest crypto ransomware outbreak in history. Following its debut yesterday afternoon, a lot of facts have been flying around. Here’s what we know, and don’t know. WCry has currently made a measly $25,000 They now made […]

I’ve seen numerous compliments for this graphic by Micke, so… here’s a high-res version. Enjoy! Source: State of Cyber Security 2017

In January 2017, I began tracking the “customer portal” of an innovative new family of crypto-ransomware called Spora. Among its innovations are a dedicated domain (spora.biz, spora.bz, et cetera) running a Tor web proxy, HTTPS support, an initially lower extortion demand, and tiered pricing with options to unencrypt individual files (up to 25Mb in size) […]

After several high-profile cyber attacks made big news headlines this year, it’s become evident to me, through online commentary, that there’s some confusion in the public space about how incident response services are utilized, how attribution is performed, and how law enforcement’s role fits into cyber crime investigations. I’m hoping this article helps to clear […]

On November 10th 2016 Blizzard enacted a “ban wave” on thousands of World of Warcraft accounts for “botting”, a term widely used to describe using third party programs to automate gameplay. Technically it wasn’t a “ban wave” – the accounts in question received between 6 and 24 month suspensions based on how often they’d been […]