A new data wiper malware has been observed deployed against an unnamed Ukrainian government network, a day after destructive cyber attacks struck multiple entities in the country preceding the start of Russia’s military invasion.
Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET dubbed the new malware “IsaacWiper,” which it said was detected on February 24 in an organization that was not affected by HermeticWiper (aka FoxBlade), another data wiping malware that targeted several organizations on February 23 as part of a sabotage operation aimed at rendering the machines unusable.
Further analysis of the HermeticWiper attacks, which infected at least five Ukrainian organizations, have revealed a worm constituent that propagates the malware across the compromised network and a ransomware module that acts as a “distraction from the wiper attacks,” corroborating a prior report from Symantec.
“These destructive attacks leveraged at least three components: HermeticWiper for wiping the data, HermeticWizard for spreading on the local network, and HermeticRansom acting as a decoy ransomware,” the company said.
In a separate analysis of the new Golang-based ransomware, Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky, which codenamed the malware “Elections GoRansom,” characterized it as a last-minute operation, adding it was “likely used as a smokescreen for the HermeticWiper attack due to its non-sophisticated style and poor implementation.”
As an anti-forensic measure, HermeticWiper is also designed to hinder analysis by erasing itself from the disk by overwriting its own file with random bytes. Read more:https://bit.ly/3C5Y9kU