Try As They Might, Ransomware Crooks Can't Hide Their Tells When Playing Hands
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Common behaviors shared across all families of ransomware are helping security vendors better spot and isolate attacks.
This according to a report from British security shop Sophos, whose breakdown (PDF) of 11 different malware infections, including WannaCry, Ryuk, and GandCrab, found that because ransomware attacks all have the same purpose, to encrypt user files until a payment is made, they have to generally perform many of the same tasks.
"There are behavioral traits that ransomware routinely exhibits that security software can use to decide whether the program is malicious," explained Sophos director of engineering Mark Loman.
"Some traits - such as the successive encryption of documents - are hard for attackers to change, but others may be more malleable. Mixing it up, behaviorally speaking, can help ransomware to confuse some anti-ransomware protection."
Some of that behavior, says Loman, includes things like signing code with stolen or purchased certificates, to allow the ransomware to slip past some security checks. In other cases, ransomware installers will use elevation of privilege exploits (which often get overlooked for patching due to their low risk scores) or optimize code for multi-threaded CPUs in order to encrypt as many files as possible before getting spotted.
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