A new Ransomware Anatova Which Hides as Game or Application

A new Ransomware called Anatova has been discovered in a private peer to peer network which is believed to be a very serious threat.

This code is prepared for a modular extension that also checks for connected network-shares and will encrypt the files on the identified shares too.

Outline of Anatova

1. Anatova uses the icon of a game or application to try and fool the user into downloading it. It has a display to request admin rights.
2. The goal of Anatova, as with other ransomware families, is to encrypt all or many files on an infected system and insist on payment to unlock them. The actor(s) demand a ransom payment in cryptocurrency of 10 DASH – currently valued at around $700 USD, a quite high amount compared to other ransomware families.

Tests and Identification

McAfee tested and analyzed Anatova’s operation as follows:

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Anatova will retrieve the username of the logged in and/or active user and compares it with a list of names encrypted. If one of those names is detected, it will go to the cleaning flow procedure and exit.

The list of users searched are:
LaVirulera
tester
Tester
analyst
Analyst
lab
Lab
Malware
malware

These usernames are by default used by some analysts or virtual machines/sandboxes in their setup, meaning that the ransomware will not work on these machines/sandboxes.

After user-check, Anatova checks for the first installed language on the system to ensure that a user cannot install one of the blacklisted languages to avoid encryption of the files.

The list of the countries that Anatova doesn’t affect are: All CIS countries
 Syria
 Egypt
 Morocco
 Iraq
 India

Anatova looks for a flag value of 0, but if this flag would change to the value of 1,it will load two DLLs with the names (after decryption) of “extra1.dll” and “extra2.dll”. This might indicate that Anatova is prepared to be modular in the near future.

Malware calculates all the processes in the system and compares them with a large list including, “steam.exe”, “sqlserver.exe”, which will then be opened and terminated. This action is typical of ransomware that attempts to unlock files that later will be encrypted, such as database files, game files, Office related files, etc.

Anatova will create an RSA Pair of Keys using the crypto API which will cipher all strings. When the keys are encrypted in the memory buffer, Anatova will enumerate all logic units and will try to encrypt the files on the hard disk/remote share.

It will then write a ransom note on the affected folder. Finally, ransomware will follow the flow of cleaning code to prevent dumping memory code that could assist in creating a decryption tool.

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