A widespread ransomware outbreak is affecting numerous organizations in Europe, particularly in the Ukraine. New reports indicate that the ransomware has spread to North America. No eSentire customers are known to have been impacted by this attack. The ransomware appears to leverage multiple propagation mechanisms, including the ETERNALBLUE exploit that was previously used by the WannaCry ransomware worm.
- The eSentire Threat Intelligence team is continuing to analyze Petya samples to gain further understanding of its behavior.
- Based on an analysis in our labs, we have confirmed that the ETERNALBLUE exploit is one of the propagation vectors. There are also indications of other propagation mechanisms that rely on insecurely configured network shares.
What you should do about it:
- eSentire highly recommends deploying MS17-010 patches to all unpatched systems.
- Exercise extreme caution when handling email from unknown senders, especially those containing attachments.
- We recommend with all types of ransomware that the following precautionary actions be taken:
- Maintain up-to-date back-ups that are stored offline.
- Isolate infected assets and assets suspected of compromise immediately.
Additional Details
There have been reports of malicious Word documents using the CVE-2017-0199 vulnerability being used as the initial infection vector for this ransomware attack. We have not confirmed these reports as yet.
Currently, known hashes of files associated with this threat are as follows:
MD5
2813d34f6197eb4df42c886ec7f234a171b6a493388e7d0b40c83ce903bc6b047e37ab34ecdcc3e77e24522ddfd4852da92f13f3a1b3b39833d3cc336301b713
SHA256
02ef73bd2458627ed7b397ec26ee2de2e92c71a0e7588f78734761d8edbdcd9feae9771e2eeb7ea3c6059485da39e77b8c0c369232f01334954fbac1c186c998027cc450ef5f8c5f653329641ec1fed91f694e0d229928963b30f6b0d7d3a7454c1dc737915d76b7ce579abddaba74ead6fdb5b519a1ea45308b8c49b950655c
While the ETERNALBLUE SMB exploit appears to be the primary propagation mechanism, we have observed attempts by the malware to connect to network shares via the WebDAV protocol. In addition, the malware sample we’ve analyzed also contains the PsExec utility from Sysinternals – this appears to be another means of propagation from the initial victim to other machines on the internal network.
Deployment of the MS17-010 patches is extremely important. The Microsoft SMB vulnerability is the primary means of spread. If your network is impacted by this or any other ransomware attack, we do not recommend ransom payment, as there is no guarantee that the affected data will be recovered.
