Tuesdays Cyber Attack

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
may have been about destruction, not ransom


Tuesday’s massive ransomware outbreak was, in fact, something much worse


Researchers at antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab, in a blog post published Wednesday, labeled the previous day's malware a "wiper." They explained that for attackers to decrypt a paying victim's computer, they need a "personal infection ID" that's displayed in the ransom note. In the 2016 version of Petya, the ID contained crucial information for the key recovery. Tuesday's malware, by contrast, was generated using pseudorandom data that was unrelated to the corresponding key. Kaspersky Lab researchers Anton Ivanov and Orkhan Mamedov wrote:

If we compare this randomly generated data and the final installation ID shown in the first screen, they are the same. In a normal setup, this string should contain encrypted information that will be used to restore the decryption key. For ExPetr, the ID shown in the ransom screen is just plain random data.

That means that the attacker cannot extract any decryption information from such a randomly generated string displayed on the victim, and as a result, the victims will not be able to decrypt any of the encrypted disks using the installation ID.

What does it mean? Well, first of all, this is the worst-case news for the victims – even if they pay the ransom they will not get their data back. Secondly, this reinforces the theory that the main goal of the ExPetr attack was not financially motivated, but destructive.
 
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