Other examples of known filecoder/ransomware are: This is possible when a shared drive on a file server is encrypted, but the server itself does not contain the malware infection (unless it is a Terminal server). While your files may be encrypted, your system may not be infected. This can make this infection seem as though it is spreading through your network when it is not. Typically a workstation is infected, and then the filecoder/ransomware will attempt to encrypt any mapped shared drives. This kind of malware can also have a built-in timer with a payment deadline that must be met otherwise, the price for unlocking the data and hardware will grow – or the information and the device will ultimately be rendered permanently inaccessible.įilecoders/Ransomware are infections that encrypt personal and data files. Some ransomware families performed worse, or even crashed, when deployed on the faster test systems.Ransomware is malware that can lock a device or encrypt its contents to extort money from the owner in return for restoring access to those resources. In the analysis of the test, the researchers noted that “there was no direct correlation between a sample using a larger amount of system resources with a faster encryption speed.
There was variety within a family as well: a single Babuk variant was the slowest software individually but the family as a whole was the second fastest overall. The researchers found some families were efficient, while others used large percentages of CPU time and very high disk access rates. Splunk analysts also wanted to quantify the encryption speed for each individual sample as well as the median speed and duration across the families of malware. Strengths and weaknesses within ransomware families The fastest ransomware families worked much quicker than that: The median total time to encrypt was 42 minutes and 52 seconds. We enabled Windows logging on each host to collect, synthesize, and analyze the data in Splunk.” … We assigned each host ‘high’ or ‘mid’ level resources to test how ransomware would behave with different processors, memory, and hard drive configurations.
Two hosts ran the operating system Windows 10 and the other two hosts ran Windows Server 2019. “…we created a modified version of the Splunk Attack Range lab environment to execute 10 samples of each of the 10 ransomware variants on four hosts. The problem is clear, as the Splunk analysts state bluntly: “Forty-three minutes is an extremely limited window of opportunity for mitigation, especially considering that the average time to detect compromise is three days, as the Mandiant M-Trends report found.” The Splunk team quantified the total time to encrypt to give network defenders more knowledge and the ability to move “ left of boom,” or in a proactive way to strengthen defenses ahead of an attack. The median total time to encrypt was 42 minutes and 52 seconds across all 10 families. The project also examined how the ransomware utilized system resources like processor, memory and disk. Splunk’s SURGe team shared these findings in a new report, “ An Empirically Comparative Analysis of Ransomware Binaries.” Splunk is an open, extensible data platform that collects and analyzes data across an organization for security, IT and operations teams.The experiment measured the speed at which 10 variants of popular ransomware malware encrypted nearly 100,000 files across different Windows operating systems and hardware specifications.