Ransomware Attack Hits Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy Website and Demands Ransom of 0.1 Bitcoin

Hackers compromised the official website of Ukraine Energy Ministry and demanding a ransom of 0.1 in BTC that worths $927.86. It appears like the threat actors exploit the recently patched highly critical remote code execution vulnerability affecting most Drupal sites.

Threat actors continuously targeting Ukraine critical infrastructure and government networks over recent years and the ransomware attacker possibly did in a financial motivation.

Checking with the cached version of the affected site, it looks the site were running Drupal 7, which is currently under active attack with Drupalgeddon2 exploits.

According to AlienVault researchers, the website the was initially defaced by the hacker with online handle “X-Zakaria” meanwhile the second hacker arrived with ransomware and encrypted files and added a ransom note.

“What has probably happened here is that a hacktivist has hacked the site for fun, then the criminal ransomware attacker has used their backdoor, which you can see at the bottom of the page, to try and make some money,” AlienVault security researcher Chris Doman told to the BBC.

Yulia Kvitko Ukraine Cyberpolice spokeswoman said “the attack is an isolated one and no other government websites affected. This case is not large-scale. If necessary, we are ready to react and help”.

Our specialists are working right now … We do not know how long it will take to resolve the issue. Ukrenergo, Energoatom – everything is okay with their sites, it’s only our site that does not work.

The ransomware is a turnkey business for some criminals, and victims still pay the ever-increasing demands for ransom, it’s become a billion-dollar industry that shows no signs of going away anytime soon.

To defends with ransomware attacks take regular backups of your data and test your Backups that perfectly available for any time to be restored.Use Strong Firewall to block the command & control server callbacks.