After WannaCry, UIWIX Ransomware and Monero-Mining Malware Follow Suit from blog The Technology blog and podcast

After WannaCry, UIWIX Ransomware and Monero-Mining Malware Follow Suit

OK folks, welcome to another post here on the blog. As Trend Micro predicted, we have a new ransomware based on wannaCry. After WannaCry, UIWIX Ransomware and Monero-Mining Malware Follow Suit is the name of the article. It does follow suit by having the same type of thing where ms17-10 is concerned, if they didn’t find anything else. Here is a portion of that article in which it explains a little bit of what this is.

“Contrary to recent news citing UIWIX as WannaCry’s new—even evolved—version, our ongoing analysis indicates it’s a new family that uses the same Server Message Block (SMB) vulnerabilities (MS17-010, code named EternalBlue upon its public disclosure by Shadow Brokers) that WannaCry exploits to infect systems, propagate within networks and scan the internet to infect more victims.

So how is UIWIX different? It appears to be fileless: UIWIX is executed in memory after exploiting EternalBlue. Fileless infections don’t entail writing actual files/components to the computer’s disks, which greatly reduces its footprint and in turn makes detection trickier.

UIWIX is also stealthier, opting to terminate itself if it detects the presence of a virtual machine (VM) or sandbox. Based on UIWIX’s code strings, it appears to have routines capable of gathering the infected system’s browser login, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), email, and messenger credentials.”

I’m still unsure really about this server message block and what it does, but criminals are going to take advantage of this for some time to come. Why? Because, as we’ve learned, patching is not as easy as it seems to be. We can tell people to patch, but patching can take anywhere from a month, to 6 months.

I really think that is too long, and even we were surprised on the fact that Windows XP and server 2003 were even patched, from this last outbreak, but Microsoft thought it to be a good idea because of how wide spread this problem is.

I’m not going to dwell on this issue, as patching should be a first resort on fixing a vulnerability once a patch is successfully created and made available, but systems as we learned must go through testing in the larger world, and if programs break that run on these systems, then the system can’t be patched.

According to Ransomware: What Are the Bad Guys After and How Do I Stop Them? they want to cause as much damage as possible, whether it is monitary, or whether it is physical. They want to hurt you at the worst possible time, when files matter to you. Backing up is the first step, and making sure your stuff is backed up on a regular basis.

e article WannaCry & The Reality Of Patching will go in to detail on why patching is becoming a problem today.

I’ll have my longer article out, but wanted to get some more information out now while it is still fresh.

Thoughts? Please give us a holler on the comment boards.

Informazioni sull'articolo

After WannaCry, UIWIX Ransomware and Monero-Mining Malware Follow Suit was released on May 17, 2017 at 9:10 pm by tech in article commentary.
Last modified: May 17, 2017.

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