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The Petya Ransomware Is Starting To Look Like a Cyberattack in Disguise (theverge.com)
Further research and investigation into Petya ransomware -- which has affected computers in over 60 countries -- suggest three interesting things: 1. Ukraine was the epicentre of the attack. According to Kaspersky, 60 percent of all machines infected were located within Ukraine. 2. The attackers behind the attack have made little money -- around $10,000. Which leads to speculation that perhaps money wasn't a motive at all. 3. Petya was either "incredibly buggy, or irreversibly destructive on purpose." An anonymous reader shares a report: Because the virus has proven unusually destructive in Ukraine, a number of researchers have come to suspect more sinister motives at work. Peeling apart the program's decryption failure in a post today, Comae's Matthieu Suiche concluded a nation state attack was the only plausible explanation. "Pretending to be a ransomware while being in fact a nation state attack," Suiche wrote, "is in our opinion a very subtle way from the attacker to control the narrative of the attack." Another prominent infosec figure put it more bluntly: "There's no fucking way this was criminals." There's already mounting evidence that Petya's focus on Ukraine was deliberate. The Petya virus is very good at moving within networks, but initial attacks were limited to just a few specific infections, all of which seem to have been targeted at Ukraine. The highest-profile one was a Ukrainian accounting program called MeDoc, which sent out a suspicious software update Tuesday morning that many researchers blame for the initial Petya infections. Attackers also planted malware on the homepage of a prominent Ukraine-based news outlet, according to one researcher at Kaspersky. Ars Technica has more.
You are aware, I trust, that Ukraine and Russia are effectively at war, right? Why this need for convoluted conspiracy theories when the most parsimonious explanation is that Russia waged a cyberattack on Ukraine? Maybe Russia didn't give a flying fuck whether anyone could eventually decrypt the data or not, if hte point is just to cause damage. It's like asking "Why didn't they send in the Army Corp of Engineers to rebuild the bridge they just bombed to oblivion?" answer being, they just wanted to bomb the bridge to oblivion.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
According to BleepingComputer.com, you can vaccinate against NotPetya by creating and adding 3 write-protected files to your C:\Windows folder: perfc, perfc.dat, and perfc.dll.
Content doesn't matter but "Read-only" status does.
licet differant, aequabitur
Yeah, what part of him de facto annexing parts of half a dozen neighboring countries and de jure annexing part of Ukraine would give one the impression that he wants to restore the empire? What part of Putin lamenting the fall of the Soviet Union would give one that impression?
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
How was the attack poor? Sure, they didn't make any money, but they fucked up a lot of Ukraine businesses. Mission accomplished, I'd say.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.