On 2 July 2021, it became known that the REvil ransomware gang perpetrated a large attack against Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and its clients around the world, leading to thousands of companies becoming potential victims of ransomware. At the time of writing, Kaspersky researchers have already observed over 5 000 infection attempts in Europe, North and South America.
REvil (aka Sodinokibi) is one of the most prolific ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operators that first surfaced in 2019, and made numerous headlines in the past few months due to the targets they hit and their record ransomware earnings. In this latest attack, REVil infected a provider of IT Management Software for MSP, affecting multiple companies across the world. The attackers deployed a malicious payload via PowerShell script, which, in turn, was presumably executed through the MSP provider’s software.
This script disabled Microsoft Defender for Endpoint protection features and then decoded a malicious executable, which included a legitimate Microsoft binary, an older version of the Microsoft Defender solution, and a malicious library containing REvil ransomware. Using this combination of components in the loader, the attackers were able to exploit the DLL side-loading technique and attack multiple organisations.
Using its Threat Intelligence Service, Kaspersky observed more than 5 000 attack attempts in 22 countries, with the most affected being Italy (45,2% registered attack attempts), the US (25,91%), Colombia (14,83%), Germany (3,21%) and Mexico (2,21%).
“Ransomware gangs and their affiliates continue to up their game after high-profile attacks on the Colonial Pipeline and JBS, and many other organisations in different countries since then. This time, REvil operators have carried out a massive attack on MSPs with thousands of managed businesses around the world, infecting them as well,” says Vladimir Kuskov, head of Threat Exploration at Kaspersky. “This case once again demonstrates how important it is to implement proper cybersecurity measurements and solutions at all stages – including suppliers and partners.”
Kaspersky protects against this threat and detects it with the following names:
● UDS:DangerousObject.Multi.Generic
● Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Gen.gen
● Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Sodin.gen
● Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Convagent.gen
● PDM:Trojan.Win32.Generic (with Behavior Detection)