Pay attention to Cryptowall!

Published: 2014-06-11
Last Updated: 2014-06-12 03:02:42 UTC
by Daniel Wesemann (Version: 1)
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CryptoLocker might be pretty much off the radar. But Cryptowall is alive and kicking, and making the bad guys a ton of money. It mainly spreads by poisoned advertisements and hacked benign websites, and then sneaks its way onto the PCs of unsuspecting users by means of Silverlight, Flash and Java Exploits.

Somewhat unexpectedly, Java is NOT the most prominent for a change. It looks like the Silverlight sploits are currently the most successful.

If you're "had", Cryptowall encrypts all the files that you possible could want to keep (images, documents, etc), and then asks for a 500$ ransom. If you don't pay up quick, the ransom doubles. And after a while of not paying, well, the suckers delete the key. As far as we know, there is not way yet to recover the encrypted data, because the private key is not really present on the infected machine. I hope you have a recent backup.

Last week's batch of infections for example had "food.com" as a prominent source. As far as I can tell, they are cleaned up by now, but we have several samples in the database that show pages like http://www.food[dot]com/recipe/pan-fried-broccoli-226105, http://www.food[dot]com/recipe/barefoot-contessas-panzanella-salad-135723, etc, as the last referer before the exploit triggered.

The domains last week were following the pattern [a-f0-9]{6,8}\.pw and [a-f0-9]{6,8}\.eu, but this is obviously changing all the time. Still, it probably doesn't hurt to check your DNS or proxy logs for the presence of (especially) .pw domains. Yes, I had to look it up as well ... .pw is Palau. A bunch of islands in the South Pacific. It is safe to assume that most of the web sites with this extension are not actually about or in Palau.

More info: Ronnie has an outstanding write-up at http://phishme.com/inside-look-dropbox-phishing-cryptowall-bitcoins/ . Cisco's blog has a lot of IOCs: https://blogs.cisco.com/security/rig-exploit-kit-strikes-oil

 

Keywords: ransomware
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