Petya Wormed Ransomware Causes Havoc

A wormed version of the Petya/GoldenEye ransomware family has been found to be propagating via the SMB exploit patched in MS17-010 (AKA EternalBlue). This is the same vulnerability exploited by Wannacry. There is also some indication that the new ransomware worm may use Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC). A number of organizations ranging from radiation monitoring to pharmaceutical to shipping companies to oil companies have said they were victims. It is estimated that more than 1.9 million devices have the Internet-accessible SMB v1 service and are potentially vulnerable if they have not yet patched for MS17-010.

Netskope will detect all known variants of this ransomware worm as Trojan.Ransom.GoldenEye.

Unlike many ransomware families, the encryption algorithm in this version of Petya will encrypt the file and also encrypt the NTFS structures. Some of the known targeted file extensions include:

.3ds.7z.accdb.ai.asp.aspx.avhd.back.bak.c.cfg.conf.cpp.cs.ctl.dbf.disk.djvu.doc.docx.dwg.eml.fdb.gz

Indicators of Compromise

Some indicators of compromise (IOC) that we have seen so far include the following

Confirmed Hashes

MD5:71b6a493388e7d0b40c83ce903bc6b04

SHA256:027cc450ef5f8c5f653329641ec1fed91f694e0d229928963b30f6b0d7d3a745

SHA256:64b0b58a2c030c77fdb2b537b2fcc4af432bc55ffb36599a31d418c7c69e94b1

MD5:ccaeb42bbcaa53b583e1bbb4f3e883c7

SHA256:c7aedd026b9cda41daca11cd9ac216e8ac5b54fddd5cb4df655325318366988a

Ransom Payment Information

Email address

wowsmith123456@posteo[.]net

Bitcoin address

1mz7153hmuxxtur2r1t78mgsdzaatnbbwx

Associated URL

http://benkow[.]cc/71b6a493388e7d0b40c83ce903bc6b04.bin

General Recommendations

Netskope recommends the following best practices for enterprises in order to protect from ransomware threats:

• Detect and remediate all threats at rest in sanctioned cloud services using a threat-aware cloud access security broker (CASB) like Netskope.
• Disable Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC)
• Detect and remediate all threats being downloaded from unsanctioned cloud services using a threat-aware cloud access security broker(CASB) like Netskope.
• Regularly back up and turn on versioning for critical content in cloud services.
• On managed devices, administrators should enable the option to view known file extensions.
• Administrators should advise their users to avoid executing any files with dual extensions unless they are very sure that the files are benign.
• Administrators should warn users to avoid opening untrusted attachments, regardless of those attachments’ extensions or file names
• Enterprise users should always keep their systems and antivirus updated with the latest releases and patches. Microsoft has released the following Security Update for MS17-010, Security Update for Microsoft Windows SMB Server (4013389)
• Disable SMB for the functions not using it within an enterprise. Additional details can be found in the following Microsoft support article
• Administrators can also consider adding rules to specific firewall ports to prevent SMB traffic from leaving the corporate environment as mentioned in the following Microsoft article.